Barry Hand

Photo by Adri­aan Bloem

From Google Sup­port

Google has made a pol­icy revi­sion that applies to com­plaints we receive regard­ing trade­marks in the UK and Ire­land. For com­plaints received on or after Fri­day, April 4, 2008, we will no longer review a term cor­re­spond­ing to the trade­marked term as a key­word trig­ger. How­ever, we will con­tinue to per­form a lim­ited cour­tesy inves­ti­ga­tion of com­plaints regard­ing ad text pur­ported to be in vio­la­tion of a trademark.

Begin­ning May 5, 2008, key­words that were dis­abled as a result of a trade­mark inves­ti­ga­tion will no longer be restricted in the UK and Ireland.

This bring the pro­ce­dure in line with that of the USA/Canada.

What this allows you to do, is to bid on trade­marked terms. although you obvi­ously can’t imper­son­ate or pre­tend to be the owner of that trade­mark — the recent update to the Dis­play URL Pol­icy.

Inter­est­ing times ahead, any com­plaints I’ve raised with Google, have all been han­dled quite smoothly, but Irish com­pa­nies tend to send threat­en­ing let­ters first, before check­ing what the cor­rect pol­icy is, and in some cases they don’t have the actual phrase or term cor­rectly pro­tected.