5 ms·

It sounds like someone is impersonating you on Google’s services, you put Google on notice you are being impersonated (your Mark infringed) and as a result you

It sounds like someone is impersonating you on Google’s services, you put Google on notice you are being impersonated (your Mark infringed) and as a result you are suffering (legal) damages and google’s official response acknowledges this and simultaneously says they have no duty to prohibit infringement of your mark on their services and they have no duty to provide accurate information to their end users/the public. In other words in the old phone book days, imagine if you were to list your business in the phone book but next to your business was a competitors phone number so they get all your business...you put the phone book on notice and they just say sorry we have no duty to provide accurate information. Many have said get a lawyer to send a letter...that’s a waste of time while you will continue to be damaged. Get a lawyer to file a small claims case for damages and injunction. A few benefits: 1) you could probably get a lawyer to do it on contingency (no out of pocket expenses for you, they would get a % of damages if and only if they win); 2) small claims cases can often fly under the radar of big companies and so maybe as soon as 20 days after filing you get a default judgment; 3) if the do respond a small claims case means 1 thing to them, their attorney’s fees will exceed your damages so they will probably look into it and resolve it; 4) if they want to fight it (which would be stupid if your claims are legit) small claims are extremely expedited, typically there is no formal discovery and it’s just a pretrial (where the parties will be encouraged to settle) and then a trial (possibly a mandatory mediation at pretrial or at the court on the day of the trial).

newacct583 6y ago
> It sounds like [...] It does indeed. Except the actual details are scant to nonexistant, and as others are pointing out the paraphrased "response" from Google just doesn't sound right. Google gets IP violation reports like this all the time. Clearly they have some kind of appropriate canned response that notes why they feel they aren't liable and not the "We're totally guilty!" phrasing we read above. My guess is this is more complicated than the OP is letting on.
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  In my experience, outside of engineering, most people at Google are surprisingly incompetent at their jobs. I absolutely would not assume Google knows what they're doing - in fact, at this point, I tend to assume Google has no idea what they're doing. This is based on interacting with a couple dozen people though, so it is a small sample size.
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    From direct personal experience, they do not reliably have processes in place to deal with their legal obligations. We had YouTube DMCA issues for a while, and getting past their standard forms to deal with persistent offenders was difficult to the point where I would have expected to win a lawsuit, though as it turned out we found a way to go after the uploader directly and that was a quicker way to solve that particular problem.
- grumple 6y ago
  Google has repeatedly shown itself to be abysmal at fulfilling service requests and obeying relevant laws until they are forced to do so. I don't know why you'd qassume bad faith here on the part of this user instead of google, given the very extensive public history of google failing at customer service (and they have nothing to gain but publicity which may get their issue resolved).
gbrown 6y ago
Can you get an injunction through small claims? I was under the impression (in the US at least) that this is not generally possible.
- throwaway_jobs 6y ago
  Your impression isn’t wrong, it is a jurisdictional issue, but let’s say you are right generally; however, it’s law so: Consider small claims handle most evictions, your impression would be right an eviction isn’t an “injunction”, but what is an eviction in practice if not an enjoining the tenant from continued possession and an order to vacate a property. This case might just seek relief in the form of a monetary judgement In the complaint, but in practice what is that judgement but an injunction/order for google to stop any continued act causing damages. As I noted at pretrial the parties are encouraged by the court to settle and usually at pretrial/trail the parties do a mandatory mediation (again that is jurisdictional but either way statistically Over 90% of cases will settle). In practice these settlement agreements will typically reflect additional terms such as agreement to stop engaging in X or otherwise continuing any act that damages the party as outlined in the complaint, and terms denying admission for any of the claims as outlined in the complaint. In practice image it playing out where the damaged party here gets an award for monetary damages against google and Google pays but they allow the impersonating “business” on google maps to continue to Impersonate the the damaged party by associating the website/marks with the impersonating business. Google may play the nameless, faceless corporation with no decision makers, but to don’t let them fool you. I personally imagine this thread hitting the front page Here gets google to do something.
  - gbrown 6y ago
    Thanks, that’s very helpful.

newacct583 6y ago

> It sounds like [...] It does indeed. Except the actual details are scant to nonexistant, and as others are pointing out the paraphrased "response" from Google just doesn't sound right. Google gets IP violation reports like this all the time. Clearly they have some kind of appropriate canned response that notes why they feel they aren't liable and not the "We're totally guilty!" phrasing we read above. My guess is this is more complicated than the OP is letting on.

Judgmentality 6y ago
In my experience, outside of engineering, most people at Google are surprisingly incompetent at their jobs. I absolutely would not assume Google knows what they're doing - in fact, at this point, I tend to assume Google has no idea what they're doing. This is based on interacting with a couple dozen people though, so it is a small sample size.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  From direct personal experience, they do not reliably have processes in place to deal with their legal obligations. We had YouTube DMCA issues for a while, and getting past their standard forms to deal with persistent offenders was difficult to the point where I would have expected to win a lawsuit, though as it turned out we found a way to go after the uploader directly and that was a quicker way to solve that particular problem.
grumple 6y ago
Google has repeatedly shown itself to be abysmal at fulfilling service requests and obeying relevant laws until they are forced to do so. I don't know why you'd qassume bad faith here on the part of this user instead of google, given the very extensive public history of google failing at customer service (and they have nothing to gain but publicity which may get their issue resolved).

gbrown 6y ago

Can you get an injunction through small claims? I was under the impression (in the US at least) that this is not generally possible.

throwaway_jobs 6y ago
Your impression isn’t wrong, it is a jurisdictional issue, but let’s say you are right generally; however, it’s law so: Consider small claims handle most evictions, your impression would be right an eviction isn’t an “injunction”, but what is an eviction in practice if not an enjoining the tenant from continued possession and an order to vacate a property. This case might just seek relief in the form of a monetary judgement In the complaint, but in practice what is that judgement but an injunction/order for google to stop any continued act causing damages. As I noted at pretrial the parties are encouraged by the court to settle and usually at pretrial/trail the parties do a mandatory mediation (again that is jurisdictional but either way statistically Over 90% of cases will settle). In practice these settlement agreements will typically reflect additional terms such as agreement to stop engaging in X or otherwise continuing any act that damages the party as outlined in the complaint, and terms denying admission for any of the claims as outlined in the complaint. In practice image it playing out where the damaged party here gets an award for monetary damages against google and Google pays but they allow the impersonating “business” on google maps to continue to Impersonate the the damaged party by associating the website/marks with the impersonating business. Google may play the nameless, faceless corporation with no decision makers, but to don’t let them fool you. I personally imagine this thread hitting the front page Here gets google to do something.
- gbrown 6y ago
  Thanks, that’s very helpful.