Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG): Rosetta Stone’s resilience pays off…almost

Google Inc(NASDAQ:GOOG) has been making billions through their system of AdWords, and it has obviously been very irksome to many companies. The search giant has been making a good amount of money, and quite soundly, through their AdWords. The issue has been dragged to court by many small companies who have pressed lawsuits against the search giant by saying that the company should not be allowed to do what they are doing, which is, essentially, keying advertisements to their own names. The issue has been taken to court on the grounds that these are protected trademarks. However, there are very few cases, which seem to have survived in favor of these companies. Rosetta Stone Inc(NYSE:RST)’s case is one of the more resilient ones.

GEICO’s lawsuit against Google had gone for trials, but the case was one by the latter in the middle of the trial itself. There have been other trademark owners, who have decided to fight Google on this issue, but most of them could not go on with the lawsuit, and more often than not, they ended up dropping the cases. Examples of companies who have had to do this are, Rescuecom, American Airlines, and other such companies. The Rosetta Stone lawsuit, however, is a special one. The company has managed to cling on and fight till a settlement was reached between the two companies, the terms of which have gone undisclosed.

The first lawsuit had come from Rosetta Stone to Google in 2009. The former had argued that the consumers were being mislead, since the ad keyed to its name was leading them to opt for services and goods which were fakes. The software being bought by the consumers were of below average quality. The case was lost to them after a federal court ruling, but after appeals, it was revived, and finally settled yesterday.

After a muddled ruling from the appeals court, the case was sent to the lower courts after the evidence of an internal study in 2004, of Google, showed that the confusion amongst people using the search engine was actually present. However, since Google can fight it out, as it has shown in the past, the case was finally settled upon, and both Rosetta Stone and Google decided to come together to combat the problem of piracy of trademarks, instead of fighting with one another.