Where does blatant mimicry stop and similarity start?
It is very fair for Henry Ford to get upset if some nerd tries to register another car called FORD or AFFORD or even FOARD. He might get not quite so upset if they call it PORD or DORD but he has absolutely no reason or legal right at all if a budding car designer is set on calling his new car, with Spanish flavour, an ESPORD. It might imply similarity but no expert or even amateur car buyer is going to confuse it with dear old Henry’s mass produced range.
However it seems that the youngsters at Google have developed a keen sense of paranoia to protect their new found wealth. They seem to think that everyone wants to be like them, to ape their financial success. Any name remotely google like is now a fair target for their enforcers.
We have been running spog.org for several years now, it stands for the Spanish Property Owners Guild. Our members call browsing our site “spoogling”. (Short for Spanish Property ownership ogling) We provide expert advice to English speakers wanting to buy property in Spain or live or work here.
The membership are always on the look out for information about property in spain. They are very unhappy with the current way of searching, it simply takes too long. So they asked if we could find a precise, quicker and safer way of finding property to buy or rent over the internet. We looked but there was nothing so we decided to do it ourselves. This is why.
If you search generally using any major search engine for a “2 bed house in a specific location at a specific price” you get hundreds of thousands of results, yet if you search precisely you get no results. What our members and indeed all property seekers everywhere would prefer is a focused search engine that enables owners and agents to precisely market their property to buyers and renters who can find exactly what they want quickly and in a clutter free zone.
So after much thought and research we came up with a design that seemed to solve the problem. Like all new business ideas the hardest part of implementation is what do you call it. We offered our members several alternatives which evolved into the name espOOgle. Someone said that it sounded a bit like google and that was the point it sounded a bit like google or froogle or doogle or poogle or indeed soogle but it was definitely not google. Owning the name google does not entitle you to control every single similar alphabetical variation of it. If one wants to control it, buy it it’s how capitalism works.
Espoogle is a precise Spanish Property Search Engine the name being a derivative of ESP from espana, SPOG from our Guild name and its new browsing verb to SPOOGLE. We recently put it live and began to advertise it. Naturally we used Adwords, plus national press and Overture to attract attention.
We are up to a massive 200 or so hits a day as I write. Hardly the stuff to instill fear into any major search engine, certainly not the millions of clicks one would expect if browsers associated us in any way with Google. Yet this morning a daunting e-mail from the Google enforcement team arrived. It cancelled our adwords campaign and gave us seven days notice to stop using the name espOOgle and to transfer all of our espOOgle names over to them free of charge!
Of course we have to take notice, we want to carry on using their search engine and their adwords, they work well for us. Yet they use what can only be described as blackmail to bully us in to compliance. No court of law would support the legality of their claim. ESPOOGLE is not GOOGLE. It might be similar but so is Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola as is Ford and Espord. But it is not against the law to be similar. The BEATLES didn’t send threatening letters when the BEEGEES launched their new single. If Google want to prevent people using similar names they should buy them all, they can afford it. Meanwhile let’s see if common sense prevails, we’ll keep you posted.
Writer and publisher of magazines and information service web sites about Spain in English. Based in southern Spain.
