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September 14, 2006 4:00 AM PDT
Behind Google's German courtroom battle
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Last October, the search giant grabbed headlines--and miffed some British users--when it voluntarily renamed its service "Google Mail" in the United Kingdom, 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 6-year-old trademark registration of "G-mail...und die Post geht richtig ab" (translation: G-mail...and the mail goes right off).
"Google's behavior is very threatening, very aggressive and very unfaithful, and to me, it's very evil," he said in a recent telephone interview with CNET News.com from his part-time Los Angeles home.
A Hamburg, Germany, 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 is also considering a suit in the United States 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 U.S. 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 of 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 e-mail interview.
Daniel Giersch
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--so far, unsuccessfully--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 Mountain View, Calif.-based 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.
Google v. Giersch
Sergey Brin and Larry Page started Google with a home-brewed data center in a dorm room. For Daniel Giersch's venture, it was a backpack and a bicycle.
When he was 18, Giersch founded his first company, a same-day mail delivery service designed to offer a swifter alternative to the Deutsche Post. Within a few years, by his estimation, the company was delivering 80 percent of the mail within his hometown of Itzehoe, a town of about 30,000 residents near Hamburg.
Giersch ultimately sold control of the physical delivery operations and started on a new venture he called "hybrid mail." The idea is to combine the relative security of physical mail delivery with the speediness of e-mail. A sender's document is scanned into Giersch's system at its origin, transmitted electronically to a G-mail office in the destination city, printed out at the other end and hand-delivered to its recipient. Giersch also offers users a "secure" gmail.de address, which they can obtain only by verifying their identities with a passport or other official ID card--a far different business model from Google's Gmail, he said.
In 2000, Giersch registered "G-mail...und die Post geht richtig ab" with the German trademark office. He was still investing in and developing his hybrid mail service four years later (in Germany, one has five years after registering a trademark to commercialize its use), when he saw news reports that Google planned to launch a Web e-mail service named Gmail. Google's e-mail service debuted in April 2004.
"Knowing Google is very powerful, I liked it at the time; I Googled myself everyday. I said, 'you know what? I want to call these guys,'" Giersch said in a telephone interview. "I did my MBA, and I know what a big company is looking for, and that is international growth. I knew sooner or later they would go to Germany."
After rebuffing his initial attempts to talk over the situation, Google eventually offered to buy the German trademark rights for $250,000, Giersch said. But by then, turned off by what he deemed "arrogance" on the search giant's part, he had decided never to settle. When Google started offering the Gmail service in German in 2005, Giersch believed he had grounds under German trademark law to sue the company for infringement, so he did just that.
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Google uses gmail.com, Giersch uses gmail.de.
You can go to whatever.com/.org/.gov/.net and have 4 different
things, how is this any different?
If Giersch doesn't own the gmail.com domain, how does he have
a case?
I hope he never gives in.
http://web.archive.org/web/19981212025151/http://www.garfield.com/
This predates the German man's trademark. Google approached the people at garfield and purchased the domain from then in good faith thereby transferring all rights to GMail going back to 1995 to google. All the people who filed trademark rights to GMail in the U.S. and the rest of the world after google made the announcement that they were starting the service are simply opportunist and should be charged with extortion.
service, they should have the ultimate decision on which Google
is asking to do, even though google was a university project, at
least I hope it was, for the sake of a search engine. Now they
are going into email services, if they have the hardware for it,
and if the people want it in that area. the DNS and netdress
elements should be completely different, google should have
something like "aname@gomail.com" short for
"aname@google.mail.com"
That would solve many problems and restore the peace.
-Alex
To paraphrase:
"I need someone to do all the work for my PhD thesis for me, including raising all the money for the research, as well as act as my personal chaffeur. I expect you to have a first class wardrobe, and oh yeah, I'm only going to pay you 1500 Euros a month."
Gee, what an opportunity! This certainly calls into question the sort of person this Giersch guy is. CNET journalists ought to do more research before they write their articles.
Give the guy a billion dollars, Google. Stop being cheap bastards. He beat you to the trademark, so either buy it from him or live with it.
- Pardon?
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by hawkeyeaz1
September 14, 2006 5:50 PM PDT
- "... that he's not out to block use of Gmail on a broad scale."
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See all 29 Comments >>"... I want this to stop only by shutting down Gmail."
Pardon? Can [Giersch] please speak with a little more of a forked tongue?
Or did he just 'forget' to say *in Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Moranaco?*