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Google Gets A Break As An Legal Challenge Fails

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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American Blind & Wallpaper Factory has had a suit pending against Google (GOOG) since 2003. It accuses the search engine of allowing companies to put competing advertising next to listing of firms whose names show up in search results. Smart marketers look for places where their rivals will be listed in Google search results and use the company’s AdWord program to target those pages with ad messages. American Blinds contended that this was trademark infringement.

But, the suit went away, and Google paid nothing to settle it. According to Reuters, "American Blinds stipulated that Google was paying nothing and making no change in policy in order for American Blind to settle the case."

Why did the company back out. One good guess would be that it ran out of money for its legals case and was facing Google’s almost unlimited resources to defend the action. Another is that American Blinds saw that courts has sided with Google in other, similar cases.

No matter the reason. Google wins.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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