Do Trade-Marked ´Adwords´ Infringe?

When you search the internet it is the clever use of 'adwords', keywords purchased by advertisers, that enables certain adverts and sponsored links to appear alongside your search results. But those websites and links sometimes seem to have little or no legal connection with the trade marked words used in the search, and that has led to the use of adwords by search engines becoming a highly contentious area of trademark law. Smartlaw rounds up some recent European case-law.

There has been a spate of legal actions in recent years about the extent to which trademarks are infringed when they are used as keywords to generate internet search results. So far in 2008 alone, there have been four such cases – one each in Belgium, France, Germany and the UK – and the various courts' decisions have been evenly split. The UK and German courts held that the search engine was not guilty of trademark infringement, but the Belgian and French courts took the opposite view.