Blog homeSo….. it has begun. Mark the day. Teletext have had enough and are going to the High Court in London to take on Directline Holidays for trade mark infringement as a result of bidding on their PPC listings on Google.
Get the popcorn.
Here is a side thought…… We own the trademark “TourCMS”. Should we ask everyone to stop bidding on it? Can you see who is advertising against this term that is of interest?
So Teletext Holidays….. if you would just like to stop bidding on my trademark thank you! 
If you want to be notified next time something is published sign up for email alerts or subscribe to the RSS feed. Thank you for reading!
we bid against th term “tours” and not on your trademark or even part of your trademark ie. Tour. A cheap inacurate shot …………
Hi Matt,
Thanks for commenting - so you would be happy if Directline were bidding on the term “Telet”?
This would be an interesting term to bid on - as it means nothing so doesn’t get searched for directly (in volume) - but also would be “matched” against Teletext by Google - hence not the bidder’s problem?
I guess I won’t be called as an expert witness!
One of the more contentious issues is within this whole trademark debate is Google’s controversial expanded broad match algorithm. This matches terms that are on broad match to terms that are believed to be similar, the classic example being a broad match bid on “camera bag” also displaying for “camcorder bag”. There is no limit to how the degree of this expanded matching can occur.
Therefore, Directline may not actually be bidding on the trademarked term “Teletext”. They may be bidding on “Telly Text”, a non-trademarked term on broad match which Google automatically matches to “Teletext”. As expanded broad match is an automated algorithm there will inevitably be occasions where organisations feature on their competitors terms unintentionally.
The solution is to add trademarked terms as negatives to competitors PPC campaigns but it is unlikely that this can be enforced. We will all wait and see.
Richard: we have put that very question to Google in the past few hours.