The first round in the legal battles over using trademarked terms in AdWords ads went to Google. The decision in Rescuecom v. Google was, bottom line, that Google could accept bids on trademarked terms.

Naturally, Rescuecom, the plaintiff, is appealing the decision. The case is waiting its turn in the US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. Now the Electronic Freedom Foundation has filed an amicus brief. In the brief, they claim that the use of trademarks in ads is in the public interest, citing the First Amendment.

EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz is quoted in the press release:

On the Internet, trademarks aren’t just identifiers. They are essential navigation tools and vehicles of expression. Quashing this speech goes against both the law and the public interest.

The North Carolina Institute for Constitutional Law (NCICL), led by former North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Robert (Bob) Orr, is challenging Google’s tax breaks. Orr and the NCICL are questioning whether the North Carolina Constitution allows the legislature to extend tax breaks like the ones it awarded to Google. (Google is not specifically named in the legislation.)

Orr says:

“The idea is that you don’t give individuals or individual companies to receive special treatment. There are provisions in the constitution that say your tax legislation be uniform. The fact is that these are tax breaks for one company. I don’t think anybody would disagree that these are not for Google.”

It appears Garett Rogers has gotten a little too excited about some recent domain name activity at Google. Rogers has learned of a number of domain names that were transferred to the search engine’s ownership, including:

GOOGLE-EXPRESS.COM
GET-ME-ON-GOOGLE.COM
GETMEON-GOOGLE.COM
GETONGOOGLE.NE T
GETON-GOOGLE.COM
GET-ON-GOOGLE.COM
GETUSONGOOGLE.COM
GETUONGOOGLE.COM
UON GOOGLE.COM
YOUONGOOGLE.COM

Here’s what he has to say about the activity…

Now here comes the speculation.  Given this group of new domains, Google may be getting ready to provide a pay service for webmasters that will help in the quest to “get on Google”.  If this is indeed what is happening, the service would probably guarantee faster crawl/indexing speeds.

I love speculation as much as anyone, but I doubt Google would launch any new service with a hyphenated domain or a “.net”. My guess they acquired the domain names as part of an effort to police their trademark. Although, if they do launch the “Google Express”, I’ll take two roundtrip tickets to Miami please.

A Belgian court has upheld an earlier court ruling, preventing Google from displaying items from Belgian newspapers.

The case was brought by Copiepresse, which manages copyrights for Belgium’s French- and German-language newspapers…Copiepresse argues that versions of news articles stored on Google can be seen on its service even after the articles are no longer freely accessible on a newspaper’s Web site.

One silver-lining for Google. The court reduced the fine for violation from around $1m a day to just $25,000. That probably didn’t make Copiepresse too happy, as they were hoping the fine to be substantial enough to bring Google back to the negotiation table.

…Copiepresse would still consider allowing Google to display extracts from the Belgian newspapers for a fee, although said it was up to Google to initiate contact.