The search engine giant was thwarted by Daniel Giersch, a German entrepreneur, who has held the GMail trademark for six years. He registered the name for his same-day delivery service, which offers a speedier alternative to Germany's national mail delivery service, Deutsche Post.
Giersch has been fighting off Google since the search engine giant launched its own email system in 2004. The Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM), a body responsible for European trademarks, rejected Google's appeal after they lost their initial battle with the German venture capitalist last year in Hamburg. Google has been ordered to remove all Gmail references from its German service.
Google claims that the two names are not confusingly similar and even offered Giersch $250,000 to buy the trademark rights from him. However Giersch refused to sell, claiming Google's behaviour toward him had been "very threatening, very aggressive and very unfaithful". Google maintains that it "acted reasonably and fairly".
Giercsh also owns the rights to the GMail trademark in Norway, Monaco and Switzerland, and has announced lawsuits to defend his registrations there too.
The defeat comes only 15 months after Google stopped using the Gmail name in the UK after a dispute with Independent International Investment Research (IIIR), a company that owns the right to the name G-mail and uses it to refer to part of its analytics software.
The two companies eventually settled out of court, with Google backing down and dropping the use of the Gmail name in the UK in October 2005. New users signing up for Google's email service in the UK are given the '@googlemail. com' suffix rather than the '@gmail. com' used in most other countries. According to their website, Google are "still working with the courts and trademark office to protect [their] ability to use the Gmail name".
Google have also received a potential challenge to the Gmail trademark in Canada, but so far they are continuing to use the name there.
This isn't the first time Google has experienced trouble with trademark claims. A website aimed at children to promote self-esteem, self worth and the environment has held the trademark to 'Googles' since 1994; this site claimed that Google was too similar to their own name and had generated huge confusion and unwanted email for the group.
However, Google itself has spawned plenty of copycat sites who have mimicked the search engine's minimalist graphic style and name, such as Gooogie, a site that allows users to create fake Google results, and Gizoogle, a search engine that translates its results into "gansta speak".
