There are those who have doubted that PPC is not going to die anytime soon and development was overrated and not neccessary.  Well the writing has been on the wall and so many have failed to acknowledge it.  Now this news of Google.com being able to be sued on trademark violations thru their adsense and PPC is released.  It will have a major impact on domainer’s revenue streams if the judgement holds up. Domainer’s parade may be rained on soon. 

When will people learn, nothing good last forever. As I said on a blog post recently, Lifes lessons are never free! If this holds up, Corporate America is not going to stop there, they will also go after those domains that are very similiar to the TMs as well thru google.com. This just gave the big guys big ammo to overtake domainers, if this ruling holds.

Remember, it has been said many times, “Never place all your eggs in one basket”. It will be interesting to see the sell off of domains and domain drops occur in large volumes in the coming months. The geo domain industry doesn’t look so bad after all as Bob said. I concur.

A FEDERAL COURT HAS RULED that Google can be sued for trademark infringement and cybersquatting for serving ads on sites with domain names that are similar to registered trademarks.

In the case, golf club manufacturer Vulcan Golf takes aim at Google for its “AdSense for Domains” program, which populates otherwise empty sites with AdSense ads. Vulcan Golf also sued other companies involved in creating and registering the sites, which have names like wwwVulcanGolf.com (without a period between www and Vulcan) and vulcanogolf.com.

As with “typosquatting” lawsuits, Vulcan Golf complains that Google and the other companies are unfairly harnessing its trademark. The theory is that these sites will be visited by people who are trying to reach Vulcan Golf, but err when typing the domain name into their address bars.

Google had asked for the case to be dismissed, arguing that it wasn’t responsible for any alleged trademark infringement or cybersquatting. “Google neither owns nor operates any of the domain names of which Vulcan complains,” Google argued. “Neither does Google (or its advertisers, for that matter) use Vulcan’s claimed marks (or anything similar) in the text of any advertisements.” The search company also said in its court filing that it has already removed the AdSense ads that Vulcan Golf objected to, and would have done so earlier had Vulcan Golf asked it to remove them before bringing the lawsuit.

Judge Blanche Manning of the Northern District in Illinois dismissed some portions of the case, but ruled that some charges relating to cybersquatting and trademark infringement could go forward. She wrote that Vulcan Golf’s allegations that Google “pays registrants for its use of the purportedly deceptive domain names … uses semantics technology to analyze the meaning of domain names and select revenue maximizing advertisements and controls and maintains that advertising” was sufficient to warrant further proceedings.

(Via MediaPost.com)