The issue of Adwords has become increasingly important in trade
mark law. When you buy a word from Google as an Adword, this
has the effect that whenever anyone enters that word as a search
term, your pop-up advert will appear on the screen together with
the so-called 'natural results'. You can buy
generic words as Adwords, but you can also buy words that happen to
be trade marks. The trade mark law issue that arises is this:
if you buy the trade mark of another company as an Adword, are you
infringing that company's trade mark rights?
This question has come up in a number of European cases.
In a case involving Louis Vuitton, the Court of Justice of the
European Union (CJEU) said that there will be no infringement
provided that the pop-up ad makes it quite clear to a reasonably
savvy Internet user that there is no connection between the product
being advertised and the owner of the trade mark. In other words,
the ad must not mislead. The court's thinking here
