Using competitor's names as keywords in Adwords

[vito]

When doing a Google search for one of my domains, I see that one of my competitors is using my specific domain name as one of his Adwords keywords. I happen to be the leader in my market with this site, and my site is used as a search term more than any other in my market. Which would explain why they're using my name as a keyword.

It was my understanding that this was not allowed. In fact, I have a couple of colleagues who have told me that whenever this has happened to them, they reported it to Google, and Google got the competitor to revise their keyword list.

Well, I tried reporting to Google. Unfortunately, I did not get the same results.

This is like Coke using the word Pepsi as an Adword keyword. Seems cheesy to say the least. How do I handle this problem?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Vito

[intelliot]

If your name is a trademark then you may have some legal basis to disallow their use of it as a keyword.

[vito]

The domain name itself is not trademarked. But I'm pretty sure that one of the people who had success by reporting to Google didn't have a trademarked name either.

Vito

[Traven]

I recently came accross a site that has quite a bit of good legal information for webmasters. The site is http://www.ivanhoffman.com/ and the link to the article that deals specifically with your question is http://www.ivanhoffman.com/keywords.html. Below is the relevant paragraph from that page.

However, when Geico sued Google claiming that Google’s practice of using the mark “Geico” as a search word or keyword in Google’s advertiser program, a federal trial court ruled that using marks as keywords to launch advertising does not indicate a trademark violation provided that the mark does not appear in the sponsored links. However, the court ruled that the use of the Geico name in those sponsored links might create sufficient confusion so as to constitute an infringement.

It looks like even if your name were trademarked, it wouldn't help unless your trademark appeared in the advertisement text.