While our search engine and email overlords down in Mountain View surely love the fact that their brand name ‘Google’ has entered our everyday vernacular as a verb for “to conduct an online search,” they are less pleased when people use their trademarked name for their own business purposes. And by “less pleased,” I mean “They will haul your ass to court.” That’s exactly what they did to some joker named Chris Gillespie, who back in 2012 registered more than 750 Internet domain names with the word “Google” in them (among these were “GoogleGayCruises.com” and “GoogleDonaldTrump.com”). His cybersquatting dreams were shattered when Google won arbitration and he had to surrender the domains, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision this past May.
That joker named Chris Gillespie is not done yet. He and his business associate David Elliott have filed a petition for the case to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, Consumerist reports. They argue that use of the term “Google” is now commonplace as a verb, and should no longer have trademark protections. There is legal precedent for brands whose trademarked terms become household names, a phenomenon known as “genericide.”
“The English language is dynamic,” the cybersquatter's attorneys argue in their petition to the Supreme Court. “One increasingly common trend is the ‘verbing’ of trademarks, i.e., the appropriation by the public of trademarks to express an action associated with the class of goods or services to which the product originally associated with the trademark belongs. We now refer to magazine cover photos as ‘photoshopped’; we ‘windex’ our windows to remove streaks; we ‘xerox’ exhibits; we ‘rollerblade’ down the street on our inline skates; we ‘wite-out’ the mistakes in a term paper; and we read a news article about the police ‘tasering’ a resistant suspect. This appropriation by the public is not something to be prevented; rather, it is something to be encouraged.”
The word “Google” is, in fact, an original term. The word describing the numerical entity of the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeroes is spelled “googol,” and the company’s name is a play in this word. Both the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary added “Google” as an English language verb in 2006.
That move prompted Google to provide guidelines on using the term within its trademark, specifically that it had to be capitalized, and it had to refer to specific use of the Google search engine. “ You can only ‘Google’ on the Google search engine,” wrote then-Google marketing writer Michael Krantz. “If you absolutely must use one of our competitors, please feel free to ‘search’ on Yahoo or any other search engine.”
The Supreme Court will consider taking the case, and if so would consider the merits of the complaint. If they decline to take the case, the lower court’s decision is upheld and their trademark remains as is. But if Google is worried about how some two-bit cybersquatters are using the term "Google," they do not want to see how Urban Dictionary is using their name.
