Google Abandons the Gmail Name In Germany

praps writes "A three-year trademark conflict has ended with Google withdrawing its use of the Gmail brand in Germany. On Friday, a plain-text message appeared, beginning 'We can't provide service under the Gmail name in Germany ... Bummer.' Despite the climbdown, Google Germany's spokesman said on Monday that the action was being taken 'even though we believe we're not legally obliged to do so.'" We discussed the tussle in Germany when Google first lost in court a year ago.

Surprising?

Well, it's hardly surprising. According to government records, the only names not yet trademarked are "Popplers" and "Zittzers". I remember the internal confusion at Google back in the day when there were plans to set up a worldwide network of Google hot spots, or Gspots, only to find out that it is nearly impossible to find a name that is both pleasant to the ear, even remotely meaningful and not already taken. Enyone remembers the scandal [theinquirer.net] three years ago? This is another example. And what about our beloved Firefox browser? It had to change its name not once, not twice, but trice to finally get rid of the trademark problems and still any literate person will point out to the Craig Thomas' novel, not to mention the Firefox bicycle company, or the Malaguti Firefox scooter, all of which being much older than any web browser on Earth. But does it mean that people can't use Google to check for any prior art of the name they have chosen for their projects? No. It just means that all of that trademark hysteria of the last one and a half decades, this "get outta my intellectual property!" attitude, it all hurts progress. Because, at the end of the day, isn't progress what it is all about? Shouldn't we just shut up, roll up our sleeves and start making our global village a better place instead of worrying about not hurting someones feelings or not breaking some law? I am really sick of every good initiative being sabotaged by someone who "owns" some "intellectual property". Google is probably one of ten, maybe twenty companies that are more concerned about morals and ethics than profits, yet some Germans have a problem with one of its most popular names and when do they sue? When the name is already known worldwide! This is just too much. Please let me quote a great thinker, George Bernard Shaw: "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."

Re:Surprising?

But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

So, you have an idea that I thought up... for FREE!!! Evil commie. </Reagan>

Re:Surprising?

yet some Germans have a problem with one of its most popular names and when do they sue? When the name is already known worldwide!

They sued in 2005. GMail was launched in 2004. When should they have sued? In 1999?

Re:Surprising?

yup. Frankly, if someone had mentioned 'gmail' to me with no explanation back in 2003, I'd have assumed that it was a google product. But then I don't live in Germany.

Yup. Frankly, if someone had mentioned 'Germany' to me with no explanation back in 2003, I'd have assumed that it was a Google product. But then I don't live in reality.

Re:Surprising?

Oh if only, I've been wanting Google to make an Ermany application for ages.

Re:Surprising?

The name "gmail" was already taken for an e-mail provider. Except for hard-core Google fanboys (and girls), this really seems like a pretty open-and-shut case.

For a case like Firefox, where there are other companies using "Firefox" in their name... I don't think there's any chance of bicycles and scooters being confused with a web browser. But an e-mail service and... An e-mail service, well, there might be room for some confusion there.

Google has a shitload of money. Does anyone really think they'd back down on this if they didn't have to?

Big gigantic company doesn't get its way every single time. Boo hoo. I think Google will survive.

Google is Gigantic

first of all it is 20K not 5K,
secondly their market cap at $171B is one of the largest in the world,
so yes they are Gigantic!

Re:Surprising?

Um, no, they tried to fight the little guy who held the rights to it for years and eventually the court ended up ruling against them. "Not being evil" would have been if they had walked away as soon as they realized that another guy legitimately owned the name gmail. Google's failure to crush the little guy in this instance was not for lack of trying.

In the case of windows defender at least MS had an argument that the third party had no right to use the name "windows" as part of their trademark. Google didnt even have that.

Basically the MS case in this instance is less evil than the Google case. It is amusing to see all the fanboys try to find some reason why google was being morally superior in this instance though.

You're Right, BUT...

...when it comes to Trademarks, it's not all about progress.

Copyright law and patent law are about progress, at least in the United States (and, I believe, the UK). Trademark law is about unfair competition and brand identity. The legal community (I am a law student, not a lawyer) doesn't even agree entirely on whether trademarks ought to qualify as "intellectual property" rightly considered.

If you study trademark law, you will realize that when it comes to trademarks, not only is progress not the point, but in fact progress is the problem. Specifically, back when we all did our shopping at local stores, knew the owner (who was also one of the checkout clerks), and likely lived within a few days' travel of the craftsmen who made the products we purchased, trademarks were really important to ensure quality. This is why trademark law was solely the domain of state governments in the U.S. for many years--it just wasn't a federal issue. Interstate commerce was just too big for trademarks; if you lived a whole state away, you probably had never heard of any of the other state's "brands."

There were some very big exceptions to this, of course, but they were few. If every other town had a "Johnson's Jeweler's" owned by a different Johnson, who could complain? There was no competition. The industrial revolution and mass production changed the game somewhat, but maybe less that you'd think. You could produce goods en masse, but advertising still had to take place to establish your brand. Even the telegraph and telephone, while making the world of advertising a bit smaller, didn't quite do trademark law in.

But these days, everyone's eye is on the Internet. And if you own "BobsEmporium.com," you're the only guy who can really be Bob's Emporium (dot com). Add into the mix various international treaties, and some guy in China can trademark-squat on a couple of names and when you try to start your business, you may find yourself getting sued the moment you have enough money to justify it.

Furthermore, most people don't understand trademark law well enough to realize when they do or do not have an actual trademark. All over the Internet we see these claims popping up about how this name or that is "protected," as though simply owning the domain name created a trademark. Trademarks have specific statutory requirements. One that even the courts often forget about is that trademarks are supposed to be source indicating. All those "Smarmy Comment(TM)" that you see around the web that fail to be source indicating, in my opinion, shouldn't be protectable unless the company using that tagline is actually using it to indicate source.

My perception is that trademark law needs to be revisited by a sensible legislature. The Internet creates major headaches for the establishment of a trademark, never mind its enforcement, by putting your enterprising imagination up against everyone else in the world, instead of everyone in your community. It's bad for commerce. But sensible legislatures are hard to come by, and the big players are not about to weaken their "IP warchests" by suggesting that trademark law is about as broken as every other kind of IP law.

The Information Age has changed the way we approach this sort of information, but thus far our laws haven't caught on.

Re:Surprising?

"But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."

The same could be said of STDs.

Re:Surprising?

You had me up until this bit:

Google is probably one of ten, maybe twenty companies that are more concerned about morals and ethics than profits

Google is interested in profits, period. That doesn't make them bad. It just makes them like any other publically held company. The 'Don't be Evil' motto went out the window when they went public, for better or for worse.

Re:Surprising?

Moderation. As in, 'In moderation.'

In moderation, most things are good. If I make a really good car, and I call it a Sephir, I don't want another company to be able to call their car (or car-related service) a Sephir.

However, do I care if there's a Sephir cola? Probably not.

Do I care if someone makes an email service @sephir.com? Probably not.

Frankly, I probably wouldn't care if 'Sephir' became synonymic with 'car.'

But the problem, at least in the US, is that firstly, to hold a trademark, I must actively defend it. Meaning that to demonstrate that defense, I have to C&D or sue every ISP and cola manufacturer that uses it, so that when some slimy car company opens up and tries to usurp it from me, I have a legal leg to stand on.

The other problem is a sense of entitlement. Two search engines called Google? Award it to the original Google. A non-information technology product called Google using dissimilar trade dress (meaning the word, but not the logo as it sits today)? Let them run with it. It shouldn't hurt anything.

It's not IP that hurts progress. It is the overreaching of IP theories and laws that hurt progress. If a person invents or makes something really good, why not allow him/her to enjoy some real 'bonuses' for having done so?

Re:Surprising?

It just means that all of that trademark hysteria of the last one and a half decades, this "get outta my intellectual property!" attitude, it all hurts progress. Because, at the end of the day, isn't progress what it is all about? Shouldn't we just shut up, roll up our sleeves and start making our global village a better place instead of worrying about not hurting someones feelings or not breaking some law? I am really sick of every good initiative being sabotaged by someone who "owns" some "intellectual property".

I can't comment on this particular case with much knowledge, but if I spent a lot of time, money and effort to build up a local product around a particular name, I'd be really annoyed if someone else came in from overseas and usurped all that effort making it worthless. This is particularly the case if their only claim to having the name was that they happened to be a company 1000+ times larger than my own (eg. Google, Microsoft) with expensive lawyers, and they thought it'd be a nice name for their own service. Businesses and organisations shouldn't get special treatment over others just because they happen to be well known and (in some cases) liked by a lot of people.

Clearly there should be some kind of common sense approach to trademarks, without clearly defining what that actually means, but I don't think that simply stomping on anyone who happens to already be using a name that a corporation like Google might want is the way to go. If these guys were using 'gmail' in Germany before Google created its own service, and if they were using it for something that might be confused with Google's service (which they clearly were), and if they notified Google within a reasonable amount of time, then I think they're completely within their rights to take this action. Good for them.

It's part of doing global business that some names might already be being used in some countries. The people at Google should know this as much as every other corporation and plan for it accordingly. If Google picked a global name that might eventually send more business to a possible competitor, then it's Google's own fault.

Re:Surprising?

Hey! You're infringing on the trademark of the Film Actor's Guild!

FFS

Call it GoogleMail , not rocket science.

Dasterdly Deutchmen

A look at gmail.de nets some strange foreign ramblings. The first bit which says

'G-mailer versenden und empfangen ihre elektronischen Nachrichten und echten Briefe über www.gmail.de und sparen so Zeit und Geld (Briefporto ab 2 Cent!) und entlasten unsere Umwelt.'

Now, it's been awhile since I was in high school, but that roughly translates to:

'G-mailer verily and emphatically this here electronic new right and etches uber briefs www.gmail.de and spares so this and gold (portable briefs at 2 cents) and enlisted users underwhelmed'

Clearly, they want to use gmail.de to sell personalized underpants at 2 cents per unit, despite the fact that wearers are not too impressed.

These krauts get to use gmail.de to sell their kinky feitsh-wear while the smart folks at Google get nothing? Remind me again who won the war!

Silly Krauts

I'm sure Googlegemeinschaftelektronischepostsystem will be just as catchy.

Re:Silly Krauts

You win.

Yours was longer.

Re:Silly Krauts

That should be Göglegemeinschaftelektronischepostsytemische.

Won't someone think of the umlaut?

Buy the company takeover the trademark

They should of just bought the company and took the trademark. They might have some cash to spare?

Re:Buy the company takeover the trademark

They tried and Daniel Giersch denied them.

Guess what, if they offer you a ton of money for something, you DON'T have to take it!

Gmail can be confusing in German...

G pronounced in German sounds like "gay". A few years ago when I told friends that I got a G-Mail beta account, they made fun of me and asked what my girlfriends thinks about that...

Re:Gmail can be confusing in German...

what my girlfriends thinks about that.

You see, that's how we know you're lying.

Re:Gmail can be confusing in German...

G pronounced in German sounds like "gay". A few years ago when I told friends that I got a G-Mail beta account, they made fun of me and asked what my girlfriends thinks about that...

What? That must have been a situation of an English speaker pronouncing the letter wrongly; probably just having read somewhere that it's close to the pronunciation of "gay". If you hear a German pronounce the letter, you will hear that it's nowhere near "gay".

You can compare this to people saying that the English "th" sounds like "s".

Re:'Gmail' brand sucks everywhere guys

You can give people that email too. So if you have [e-mail] then [e-mail] works too.