The search giant has been at war with a German venture capitalist over the right to use the term 'Gmail'.
Google's free Web email offering may be available for correspondence in 40 languages, but efforts at worldwide expansion using the moniker "Gmail" continue to face complications.
Last October, the search giant grabbed headlines â€" and miffed some British users â€" when it voluntarily renamed its service "Google Mail" in the UK, following an out-of-court trademark dispute.
The woes don't end there. Across western Europe, a quiet battle rages on between Google and Daniel Giersch, a German-born venture capitalist who insists he'll never relinquish his six-year-old trademark registration of "G-mail...und die Post geht richtig ab" (translation: G-mail... and the mail goes right off).
"Google's behaviour is very threatening, very aggressive and very unfaithful, and to me, it's very evil," he said in a recent telephone interview with ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com from his part-time Los Angeles home.
A Hamburg district court has already handed Giersch victories at both the preliminary and final stages of the litigation. Dismissing Google's arguments that the two names are not confusingly similar, it ordered the company earlier this year to remove all "Gmail" references from its German service and to cease handing out gmail.com aliases to users within the geographic area.
Buoyed by that success, Giersch said he plans new lawsuits to defend more recent registrations of the trademark in Switzerland, Norway and Monaco, where he hopes to expand his electronic postal delivery business that goes by the G-mail (short for "Giersch mail") name. He said he was also considering a suit in the US based on alleged "investment losses" that the overseas disputes have wrought on the American arm of his venture capital firm. (Google has already encountered competition for the US trademark.)
Google still maintains it has clear rights to use the Gmail name in Germany and in countries throughout the world where it has applied for such trademark rights. It lodged an appeal against the Hamburg district court's decision but claims it has nevertheless been abiding by the orders to restrict all people determined to be German residents to use only googlemail.com, ever since a preliminary injunction was issued in April 2005.
"In no case do we offer or allow a user to use '@gmail.com' if the user's IP address is German," a company representative said in an email interview.
Google has initiated its own actions against the 32-year-old Giersch in other European countries since the German litigation began, asserting it has prior rights to the Gmail name and that Giersch's registration attempts should be blocked. Giersch's lawyers said the company has filed â€" so far, unsuccessfully â€" for a cancellation of his Norwegian holding with the country's trademark office. The Google representative would confirm only that a court challenge is pending against the Swiss trademark, adding that "there are a number of cases outstanding against Giersch in Europe".
For the search market leader, the rationale is simple: "Google will take the action it deems necessary to protect our interests in Europe," the company representative said.
