Jeremy Schoemaker of ShoeMoney has sued a Google employee, who owns a website that uses the patented keyword “ShoeMoney†of the company. The keyword is used by the employee on his AdWords ad campaign for directing the traffic on a site – myincentivewebsite.com
The issue came to notice of Shoemoney four months ago when an ad for ShoeMoney was directing to myincentivewebsite.com. After trying a lot, Schoemaker was unable to derive the contact information of the site owner as it was set in “privateâ€. He headed to court for a subpoena addressed to the webhost of the claimed site and demanded that the company should disclose the details of its site's owner.
The defendant said that he was unaware of his site violating Google TOS and Schoemaker's trademark, he was dragged to court. He also sent the screenshot of his AdWords account and the keywords he is targeting for the campaign. This created a doubt in Schoemaker's mind and after investigation it was found that the site owner was a Google employer working as AdWords Account Strategist in Google
Even after getting sued, the defendant is saying that he did not violate the rules of Google TOS. There are chances of him either fooling everyone or he really don't know anything about Google TOS violation.
Recommend this story
Navneet Kaushal, CEO PageTraffic is a trusted authority in the search engine marketing industry. He is a featured author at Web Pro News, Search Newz, Promotionworld, Website Notes, DevWebPro, SEO Article and Web Help Now among many others.
Follow Navneet Kaushal on Google +.
@pagetraffic
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
OUCH -in capital letters, yes.
It would be interesting to hear if the employee from Google was dismissed. I cannot imagine anything less from the giant itself as it would serve less trust among its Adwords users and all others who use the search engine itself.
AdSenseAdvisor at Webmaster World has stated – “I’m an AdSense publisher, too, after all.”
Google employees are allowed to use AdSense? That’s a surprise.
“I thought there were a number of ways that position could be abused. For example, wouldn’t it be easier for Google insiders to commit click fraud? Some of them could find out how exactly their fraud detection algorithms work and evade them. Even if the employee didn’t work for the click fraud department, a very good friend of his could.”
That’s disturbing. All the people who are running the show, are competing with us? It would be child’s play to outrank us, and grab all our visitors. They KNOW the rules. We can only guess. Their optimization would be perfect. Ours would just be hit-and-miss guesses.
What % of Google employees have AdSense accounts?
How are they policed? Do they have any restrictions?
Is this data secret? Do the foxes run the hen house?
Very disturbing. It could certainly explain a LOT of things.
Our greatest adversary could be Google employees competing with us. Remember Google executive Tim Armstrong and the “Associated Content” MFA company he created in 2007? How many other secret Tim Armstrongs are there out there? I wonder.
The defendant said that he was unaware of his site violating Google TOS and Schoemaker’s trademark, he was dragged to court. He also sent the screenshot of his AdWords account and the keywords he is targeting for the campaign.
The thing I dont understand is what exactly is he suing for? Is there some kind of damages he had from this guy doing this? What can he expect to win? Or is it merely just a “stop doing this” sue
Probably a cease and desist order and any moneys he made of his accounts (unjust enrichment).