Someone at Google needs the sack

Image: BBC

The legal department at Google are obviously not doing their job. Or it’s perhaps evidence of Google getting too big for their boots, thinking that with their size and value, they can ignore pesky limitations such as common law. But the release of their Gmail has been nothing but a headache for them, over arguments concerning the name of it. Trademark infringements have now been registered in both Germany and the UK, and whilst they’ve tried to shrug it off, it’s proving to not be that simple. And rightly so.

Although the IIIR group would obviously have taken a huge cash settlement, the fact that they’re standing up to the likes of Google is a good thing. Admittedly it’s all good publicity for them and any extra cash (rumoured to be in the 10’s of millions) would be a huge boost to them.

The case is obviously different to the problems of cyber squatting since the IIIR and the German company both have valid products using the Gmail name.

All this palava could have been saved though had the legal team at Google done a more thorough job on trademark/IP searches before allowing the use of the Gmail term.

From now on, all new UK users of the Google Mail service will have a googlemail.com domain instead of the standard gmail.com.