Trademark Violation Reduex

Last week I wrote on this blog regarding a situation were Amazon.com and McAfee.com were both bidding on Top Ten Wholesale’s domain name and trademarks. We were appalled both by the fact that huge companies, such as those two, can drive up the costs of doing business for a smaller company, such as, well us and how little in the way of cooperation we received from them in correcting this violation of Google Adwords terms of service.

As I said before we contacted Google and got seeming encouraging activity from them but were also told to attempt to fix the problem with McAfee and Amazon ourself. Not surprisingly, they were of little help. They returned neither phone calls or emails.

However, in all fairness, we wish to report that Google has taken action and made tremendous steps towards rectifying the situation. We received an email from them saying that they agreed that McAfee’s “ad text was unclear” and that McAfee’s ad would no longer contain our trademarks and domain name. We greatly appreciate their speedy action.

Although Google didn’t mention it in their email we they seem to have removed Amazon’s ad from our trademark as well. They also promised that we would here from their trademark department as well once they had fully reviewed the situation.

We inquired if there were further punishments other than simply removing the offending ad and they said that “I can assure you that repeat violators are suspended from our advertising program. We do not tolerate repeat malicious violations of our policies.”

We do not expect much to come from this but I must say I fail to understand how a trademark violation can be anything but malicious. It simply isn’t possible for this to have been a mistake. Putting a bid on some ones domain name is a conscious act and requires planning and forethought. It doesn’t happen by accident, it happens because a company wants to crowd a competitor and harm their business.