16 June 2006

Brand Squatting leads to a lawsuit for Yahoo!

JP Enterprises has dropped a trademark infringement lawsuit on Yahoo! and other companies for allegedly paying for search engine advertising on Google for trademarked search queries.

JP Enterprises, which runs the online dating service lovecity.com accused Yahoo! and other companies of bidding on Google's results pages for queries such as "lovecity", "lovecity.com" and "www.lovecity" in the lawsuit filed in federal district court in Denver, Colorado USA.

Named in the lawsuit were Yahoo! which runs an online personal dating service as well as HDVE, which controls True.com and Spark Networks - which operates a variety of e-dating services such as AmericanSingles.com and JDate.com. The role of the third party that was included in the law suit Insight Direct USA is a bit of mystery as there is limited information available.

The lawsuit was brought to the public by the Denver Post on Thursday the 15th of June 2006. Yahoo!, Spark Networks, Insight Direct and True.com all remain silent on the matter.

JP Enterprises claims these companies are squatting on their trademark by using these keyword phrases to create a presence for their dating websites which violates trademark infringement laws. JP Enterprises seems to be in the right to say that this will damage their "lovecity" brand image that has taken a lot of time and effort, not to mention hundreds of thousands of dollars, to build and to instil trust with its users. The company is very aware that this will result in consumer confusion and a downward turn in sales.

JP Enterprises is also concerned that the companies that are squatting on their trademark in Google will "tarnish the goodwill and reputation" of lovecity, "causing lost sales".

Both search engine giants have previous claims against them for trademark infringement suits for allowing competing companies to brand squat by bidding on trademarked search terms. This story's shaping up to be a slow boiler...