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The Motley Fool is reporting that Google is being sued by American Airlines for selling sponsored ads targeted at the keyword ‘American Airlines,’ a trademark of the airline. Here’s an excerpt from the full article, located on Fool.com:

To understand the situation a little better, fire up Google and punch in “American Airlines.” Google’s AdWords program serves up sponsored results along with the organic search-engine results. Online advertising accounts for as much as 99% of Big G’s revenues — it’s clearly a big part of the Google model.

Your mileage may vary, but when I searched this morning for “American Airlines” (in quotes, but it works just as well without them), I saw several third-party ads. The most prominent ad, at the top of the page, is for AMR’s own AA.com website. However, the column on the right features rival airlines and portals that promise discounted airfares.

The ads themselves don’t feature the American Airlines brand. However, the ads wouldn’t be on the page if the sponsors hadn’t bid on the trademarked term. To be sure, I logged into AdWords and saw that I could bid on the term “American Airlines” for as little as $0.04 per click. (Minimum bids vary depending on ad quality, even within the same keywords.)

Is this right? Is this wrong? The only thing for sure is that a lot of money is weighing on the answer.

What will make this one really juicy for the lawyers is that, with most searches on the web being case-insensitive (as far as I can tell–if someone knows differently, please feel free to comment), the trademarked term ‘American Airlines’ and the perfectly reasonable search for ‘american airlines,’ aka airlines offering service in america, are one and the same in a search engine’s mind.

Obviously, the larger issue is whether or not things like ‘Disneyland’ can be bought as a search term when trademarked by a company, but it’s a little more interesting in the case of American, whose decades-old choice of a name designed to build brand recognition might actually confound an already complicated issue even more.

Another interesting point that the article makes is that, if trademarks are ruled off-limits in advertising media like Google, it will also allow the trademark holder to withhold advertising funds from Google for those particular terms, as there would be little reason to advertise for a search term when no competitor could:

It is easy to see that Google could lose a lot of money if it caves in on these cases. If no one else is allowed to bid on “American Airlines” and other AMR trademarks, AMR has no reason to bid on it, either. It is the top organic search-engine result.

Of course, on a more personal level, I will be interested to see how this case is resolved, and what effect, if any, it will have on the blogosphere, many of whom rely heavily on Google AdSenseâ„¢ for their blog’s revenue stream.

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That’s right! The ACLU is now supporting a man in his struggle to take the last name of the woman he intends to marry without undergoing the traditional name change procedure for anyone wishing to rename themselves. The plaintiff, Michael Buday, is alleging that the $320 fee he must pay, as well as the advertisements he must take out in newspapers to announce the official name change, constitute discrimination, since his wife could change her last name for a mere $50 as part of the process of formalizing the marriage. The full story is available here.

I appreciate this man’s efforts to put back in the past another rediculously outdated notion, that of a woman becoming the property of her husband upon marrying him. Also, it should shed some light once again on the difference between the state’s civil definition of marriage and various Christian organizations’ religious views on the institution which unfortunately shares the common name of ‘marriage.’ What may seem at first silly is in fact a serious point of contention in this country right now, especially in light of the struggle of gay rights groups to achieve the same legal and civil protections which secular marriage laws now afford only to heterosexual couples. We must, as a nation, come to understand that the reasons for two people to come together and share their lives with one another are often unrelated to any Christian or other religious values, and that offering secular advantages for adherents to certain religious viewpoints violates the separation of church and state that we supposedly hold so dear to our very basic notion of liberty.

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