Trademark – Google Sued For Trademark Infringement for Third Level Domain Name

Google has been sued for Trademark infringement by “Jews for Jesus.” The suit is based on Google’s “blogspot” service. The service offers blogs with third level domain names, i.e. “jewsforjesus.blogspot.com.” The suit makes a number of claims, some far from credible, or recognized by current Trademark law. The most important is that Google profits from the domain name – jewsforjesus – and as a result, bears some liability for its user’s infringement. This claim will be hard to make, since U.S. law requires that liability only occurs if the registrar had a bad faith intent to profit from the infringement when the domain name was registered. This case is important to follow as more and more Internet Infrastructure providers add innovative services, including blogging, to their product offerings in order to differentiate their products. Discussion of the case