Counterfeit Handbags at Dawn

The case of Louis Vuitton v Google involves trademark infringement. Proceedings were initially raised in France, but the French court referred a number of questions to the European Court of Justice ("ECJ") which has now, after a lengthy process, issued its decision.

The alleged violations against Google arose as a result of a service offered by Google called 'AdWords'. Advertisers buy keywords from Google and when the keyword is entered by a user of Google, the advertiser's website appears as a sponsored link at the top of the search results. Advertisers were buying Louis Vuitton's trademarks and when users selected the sponsored link they were directed to the advertiser's site which often featured counterfeit versions of Vuitton's products. Louis Vuitton claimed that Google's practice of allowing anyone to pay for keywords that were trade marks of Louis Vuitton was infringement of those trademarks. Google's position was that it was simply providing technology