Brand misuse with Adwords can be expensive
Registering trademarked terms as AdWords can be expensive, as a look abroad shows. In Switzerland, there has not yet been a high-profile court case, as Lukas Stuber, CEO of Angelink-Yourposition, told *Werbewoche*.
Booking trademark-protected terms as Adwords on search engines such as Google or Yahoo can be expensive. In Germany, unfair advertising with well-known trademarks can result in warning costs of up to 5,300 euros, and in the second instance even up to around 40,000 euros, as the Munich IT lawyer Max-Lion Keller told Pressetext.de. Last fall, there were two rulings in Germany that interpreted the Adword booking of a trademark by a third-party company as a trademark infringement. And the responsibility was attributed to the person who booked the Adword, not the search engine operator. "As far as I know, no such judgment has been made in Switzerland," Lukas Stuber, Managing Director of Angelink-Yourposition, told Werbewoche. "In this country, search engine marketing is still in its infancy compared to other countries. This is probably why there is still no awareness of the problem. Another reason could be the small scale of Switzerland. In industry associations, people know each other and refrain from such confrontations. But that's just a guess."
Judgments from the USA and Austria show just how different case law can be depending on the country. In the USA, for example, a court in the state of Virginia declared the search engine operator Google to be jointly liable if trademark law is infringed when booking Adwords. In Austria, on the other hand, only the person booking the Adwords was liable. However, the Viennese court ruled that the booking of third-party brand names as Adwords is not punishable; it is only punishable if the booked term also appears in the ad text.
To avoid such disputes, Lukas Stuber recommends that companies in Switzerland protect their trademarks on Google and the like as a preventive measure. "You can have your protected trademark blocked for others on Google free of charge, so that the name cannot be booked as an adword by others. You can also do this if you are not a Google customer."
