I am not an expert on French law. In fact, I know considerably more about French fries, French kissing and French cricket than I do about French law. But I have gained the impression that the French courts are out to get Google and eBay. So I was surprised by the extension of the Google policy on trade mark complaints from laid-back Ireland and the laissez-faire UK to most of the rest of Europe and various other places (including, gloriously, the {Glorioso Islands: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorioso_Islands} which I didn’t previously know existed but which are presumably inhabited by Google entrepreneurs currently serving in the French Foreign Legion). The news story about it is {here: http://www.scl.org/site.aspx?i=ne16926}.
I think this is a bold move. The AdWords judgments leave a fair amount of room for domestic courts to rule on trade mark breaches on the particular facts before them. And we all know that facts are like beauty – ie pretty obvious to the vast majority but beheld very differently by a perverse few. While I am not suggesting that the French judiciary are perverse, or at least I am not suggesting that they are any more perverse than the judiciary as a whole, I did wonder if the {‘blog officel Google AdWords en francais’: http://adwords-fr.blogspot.com/2010/08/changement-applique-aux-regles-en.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Adwords-Fr+%28AdWords+-+FR%29} revealed a lack of confidence in the new policy’s chances of being deemed lawful in France. The relevant entry is entitled ‘Changement appliqué aux règles aux matière de publicité: faîtes vos jeux!’
Isn’t ‘faîtes vos jeux!’ what they say as the roulette wheel spins and the ball is about to be thrown?
I don’t think that the path to a successful fortune really involves roulette, even if the French version is preferable to the Russian. I think even Google thinks it is taking a gamble.
