14 DAY TRIAL // The Google England office is planning to sue a Dutch company that bought several domains with the "google" term in the name. The search giant sustained that Google is a registered trademark so the Dutch company is not allowed to use the term in any of its links. Marcel van der Werf, the owner of the domains said that he should be let to buy any domain he likes because the Mountain View company didn't buy the entire alphabet. However, it seems that several of the websites owned by the Dutch firm were already shut down while one of the link redirects the users to the Google Netherlands official page.
"A brand is linked to a product, but not to the alphabet. The name used in the address bar is a way to reach a computer. It is merely an indication and not a brand," van der Werf said according to Computerworld. "The hosting provider had, urged by Google, disconnected the database from Googledatingsite, after which I moved it to Russia," he also added. The Dutch company sustained that it had lost a lot of users because the database was removed without any notification, while the provider didn't allow them to make a backup.
Google's representatives confirmed the trouble and sustained that van der Werf has no authorization to use the term Google in its domain names. "Mr. Van der Werf has registered a number of domain names which infringe Google's trademark and other intellectual property rights. We are in the process of starting legal proceedings against him. The accusations being made against Google by Mr. Van der Werf are factually inaccurate and legally baseless," a Google spokesperson said according to Computerworld.
In the past, Google encountered similar problems with Gmail, its famous mail solution that was unavailable in some countries because other companies registered the domain before the search giant's expansion.