Research On The Issue Of Trademark Infringement In Adwords

With the development of Internet business, the search engine as a key link of informations and users, plays a more and more important role. The search engine has created many conveniences for people, while a series of infringement problems following, especially there were more and more cases which related to the search engine’s adwords trademark infringement presented in various countries. The traditional trademark law was challenged by the new network environment.The reason why adwords services involved in trademark infringements, is that many advertisers take some famous trademarks as the key words. When the users enter these key words, hyperlinks appeared in the search results might not necessarily be the trademark owner’s website, and maybe other sites of similar products or even a competitor’s site. But is this form illegal and how to define the legal responsibilities of the search engine company are the key issues. Proposing the judicial interpretation which specify search engine trademark infringement is important not only for search engine industry, but also for the trademark owner and consumers.This paper try to analyse the problems about adwords trademark infringement by considering the cases of several countries, based on the traditional trademark theories, without introducing "initial interest confusion" and "trademark indirect infringement" and put forward my own views on this issue. This Paper include five chapters besides the Preface and Conclusion. In Chapter1, summarized the adwords, by organizing how does it works and clarifying the adwords’s profit model. In Chapter2, combined with the advertising law, pointed out the legal nature of adwords and many infringement disputes triggered by this services. In Chapter3and Chapter4, analysed the advertisers and search engine service providers infringe or not respectively, after analyzed the advertiser’s responsibility, author considered the notice responsibility of search engine companies, which guided by the idea of balancing of interests; In Chapter5, according to the analysis of adwords, this paper tried to point out the function damage standards and insisted that it is necessary to make reasonable notice responsibility on search engine companies for later cases solving.