Not to bite the hand that feeds me, but Google’s just being cheap. It’s surprising to hear the billion dollar giant couldn’t offer more than $250,000 to purchase the rightfully owned trademark to Gmail in Germany.
The Gmail trademark is owned by Daniel Giersch who founded a company called G-mail as a competitor to the German postal service. It’s like UPS to our Postal Service and I’m sure UPS wouldn’t hand over their trademark for a measly $250K.
According to the affiliate blogger (Bobbie), EuroGoogle lost its appeal for the trademark to Gmail. As much as I love Gmail, I’m glad to see that the court systems are sane over in Europe and don’t buckle under the dollar signs followed by all those zeros. Giersch held the trademark long before Google even launched its e-mail service.
Looks like we’ll be seeing Google Mail Germany (hey, look, the domain’s already registered).
Ouch: “Google was ordered to remove all Gmail references from their German services”. It is nice to see the little company win every now and then! The bigger, richer and more powerful a company gets the more they think they can away with. I like Gmail and Google is my default setting for my browser but I’m glad they lost. Now they can cough up what that trademark is really worth to them.
[ February 12th, 2007 at 8:59 pm] [ #Link ]