• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, August 17, 2005

Google might say its mission is to organize the world's information, but the company appears to have a hard time spinning information about itself.

This week, reports surfaced online stating that Google had lost a trademark infringement lawsuit brought by insurance company Geico. Headlines such as "Google loses AdWords trade mark case in the US," "Google Loses Geico trademark infringement case," and "Google Loses Trademark Case Versus Geico," all appeared Monday and Tuesday--although at least some of the headlines and accompanying stories had been amended by the end of the day Tuesday.

The wave of articles seems to have been triggered by a Geico press release issued last week, which declared victory in the case.

In fact, however, for all practical purposes, Google won the trademark infringement lawsuit brought by Geico when Federal District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema dismissed the most crucial portion of the case mid-trial late last year.

In her oral decision last December--which she finally put in writing last week--Brinkema ruled that Geico hadn't proven that Google's policy of allowing Geico competitors to appear as sponsored listings when consumers typed the word "Geico" into the query box violated Geico's trademark. She stated that Geico didn't present enough evidence to convince her that consumers were confused by the practice.

But in a portion of the holding affecting just a small portion of the case, Brinkema ruled last December--and repeated last week--that sponsored ads that included the word "Geico" in the headline or text of the copy caused confusion, and therefore violated Geico's trademark.

She did not--either in December or last week--rule that Google was responsible for those ads. Brinkema stayed the matter for 30 days to give the parties a chance to settle, with regard to that one issue. Otherwise, the trial would proceed to determine whether Google was responsible for ads in which the text includes another company's name--and, if so, what Geico's damages are.

That small part of the case isn't likely to have ramifications for the search industry, because Google officially forbids companies to use the names of other companies in the text of ads. While some such ads slipped through the cracks in the past, Google attorney Michael Kwun said that the company is better able to block those types of ads now. "When our systems were less mature, we didn't catch as many of these problematic ads as we might have," he said. "Today, our technology is much more sophisticated."

Despite its extremely limited scope, last week's ruling prompted Geico to issue a press release framing the decision as a win: "Judge Brinkema in her written decision held that the use of GEICO's trademarks in paid advertisements violates the law," stated the press release--which neglected to explain that Geico lost the major portion of the case.

Geico's public relations maneuver--combined with the eight-month delay between the oral and written decisions--apparently led some publications and Web sites to believe that the outcome in the case had changed since last December. The result was this week's wave of misleading headlines.

Google's normally tight-lipped team responded with an unusually public effort to set the record straight. A missive by Kwun appeared on the Web, in which he attempted to clarify the ruling: "In the critical part of the decision, the judge ruled unequivocally in Google's favor," he wrote. "Google is extremely pleased with the outcome in this case. The important issue for us in it--which is the use of trademarks as keyword triggers--was decided decisively in our favor."