French company files to cancel one of Google’s trademarks, gets hit with UDRP over .mobi domain name.
Google has filed a UDRP against the owner of a French trademark for “adwords” over his domain name ad-words.mobi.
The domain owner, Francotel, LLC, has a French trademark for “adwords”, but Google has some as well. Francotel has also filed for cancellation of Google’s European Union trademark for “Adwords”, although it appears the company has filed a newer application for the mark.
The domain name resolves to a page that states “Place your Ad with some Words here”.
The bottom of the page says “don’t be the devil”, which may be a jab at Google’s slogan “Do no evil”.
It will be interesting to see if the UDRP panel decides this case, or if they decide to punt to the courts.
What will we do in 50 years when every single or combination of two common words has been trademarked? Heck, I wouldn’t have given a trademark to “Google” either – that used to be a really big number, but now it’s that same number as a corporate value with a $ sign in front of it. I’m opening a corp. named “Five” so cease and desist right now or I’ll call udrp’s on you.
Jim, did you know that the number is spelled googol, and the company is Google?
It’s more like trademarking “fi5e” (though I’m not sure if he’s done so or not).
@Jim: Googol stands for a very big number, not google.