Google victorious in US trademark & German copyright cases

Google scored a brace of legal wins in courts in Germany and the US yesterday, over two separate lawsuits brought against it. The search giant won a trademark court case yesterday in the US against foreign language education firm Rosetta Stone, which brought a lawsuit against Google’s business practice of letting third parties …

[Jimmy Floyd]

Rights of appeal

"Rosetta Stone ... plans to appeal once the company has reviewed the court’s written judgment."

See, I always thought the appeals process was for the situation when one party felt the legal process hadn't followed procedure, or other such technicalities. Now it's just for "we didn't like the opinion of this court, so we're going to find another."

[Anonymous Coward]

That's Always Been the CASE(tm)

This is the way IT has always been. The Trick-or-Treat is to find the (mis)Application Executable of the rule of Law or the (mis)AInterpretation of Statute to Use the Force decision you want.

[prathlev]

@AC 14:05, amanfrommars?

Why would amanfrommars post as AC?

[Da Weezil]

irrelevant

Google has long since ceased to be a relevant search tool for me. If I search for Bloggs widgets, and they have a web presence then I expect THAT to be first on the list, not buried away below those opportunistic rivals who have bribed Google to list themselves above the EXACT search I have requested.

Does ANYONE still buy the benign Google crap? Its as greedy and avaricious as Redmond and has as little respect for its users privacy as the current UK govt . Simply put - its another multinational that cant be trusted and relies on the sheeple trusting them in return for an easy life where they dont have to think too hard for themselves.

Hand grenade - because the world would be a better place if a few were discharged around Googles operating hardware.

[MacroRodent]

Not at MS level yet

Google has a looong way to go before it is "as greedy and avaricious as Redmond". It is easy to avoid using Google services if you don't like them, but you frequently find you pay for Microsoft in one form or other even if you prefer the competition.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Da Weezil

I notice you didn't offer us any information about what you now use instead of Google.

Perhaps it's Bing? Or Yahoo search?

Just out of interest, I searched for "Bloggs widgets" on Google and got NO ADS AT ALL!!

[Anonymous Coward]

gah!

robots.txt

that is all.

[John Lilburne]

When has robots actually worked?

First many do not have access to robots.txt because they don't have access to the sites root. Or they do not have the expertise to cover all the bases. One shouldn't need to be an expert in web technologies in order to keep the fuckers at Google from profiting from your content.

From experience the least chink in the armour and even the well behaved bots are all over a site. Most of the buggers don't give a rats about robots anyway.

[petur]

@Da Weezil

Works fine here, the error must be at your end ;)

[Pirate Dave]

why

does Google's response sound so much like it was written by someone from Microsoft? Actually, if you re-read the story and replace "Google" with "Microsoft", it's still totally believable.

[Trevor Pott o_O]

Chocolate Factory?

I thought we were going with DataKraken. Okay, I didn't actually think this would get changed, but I still think it's far more appropriate.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

@irrelevant

Google does not charge to be higher on the search list.

There are a number of underhand tricks that 'dealtime' type sites use to get higher up the list - and google actively fights them. It's not in googles interest to have scams at the top of their search list.

This argument was about eg. searching for BMW and allowing Mercedes to pay to be a sidebar ad.

[heyrick]

Image thumbnails

While I can see artists want to retain their copyright to make money on their work, the flip side is that the thumbnails permit people to be able to find their works; so as long as the thumbnail is too small to be useful for any other purpose, and that it links to the artist's website so you can see the picture (bigger, I would presume) plus options to purchase, then I can't say I have a problem with image search.

There is something Google does do... if I look for specific phrases, I can easily find *entire* copies of stuff I have written, sitting pretty on a server in <cough>China</cough>. Clear case of copyright infringment, but nothing to do with Google.

[Anonymous Coward]

robots.txt

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

And googlebot will not bother you again, nor drive any more traffic your way.