Google is a great company. They provide excellent services, mostly for free, and despite being huge with vast amounts of money they still manage to maintain a sense of humour even when it comes to protecting their brand:
When Washington Post reported that “Google” had entered the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, it observed that the word has become a descriptor for its sector. Google wrote that it must avoid “genericide” and provided a list of appropriate and inappropriate uses of its name.
Among its examples was this appropriate use: “I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party”; and this inappropriate use: “I googled that hottie”
The Out-Law article I took the above quote from provides an interesting editorial on one of my favourite areas of law – internet/computer related intellectual property law. The internet has changed a lot of things and IP law is one aspect of law that has had to change quite drastically.
The risk for Google is that it ceases to become a brand altogether. If it becomes generic, the brand can be struck from the register of trade marks, leaving the owner without rights. This has happened before: escalator, aspirin, pogo, gramophone and linoleum were once registered trade marks that became victims of genericide.
One case that comes to mind is the fight over sex.com. This domain was stolen from it’s owner due to a con man tricking Network Solutions, the .com domain registrations agency. A lengthy legal battle ensued and to cut a very long story short, the law was changed to recognise a domain name as an object of property that can be sold and that can have value. A great deal of value in the case of sex.com.
