Using a competitor's name on a search engine is unfair competition, decides T...

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Companies cannot use the name of products sold by competitors in Google search indexing. For the 2nd Reserved Chamber of Business Law of the São Paulo Court of Justice, doing this is engaging in unfair competition.


The court condemned a company that bought the word "Neocom" in Google search results, even though it knew that one of its competitors used the name in one of its products. In the first instance, the company was ordered to stop using the term on its website and pay compensation of R$15,000 to the other company for moral damages.

In the appeal to the TJ-SP, the defendant B2B Lead argued that the expression “Neocom” is generic to name the product, used in the sanitary partitions segment. He said that this context makes the term “brand synonymous” with the field of activity. Regarding the competitor's possible losses, she claimed that no losses to the author were proven.

Disclosure
Using a competitor's product name in a Google search is unfair competition.
But the appeal's rapporteur, judge Claudio Godoy, disregarded the request. For him, there is sufficient evidence to justify the conviction, including notarial documents. He explained that in this case, "a sign that is customarily used to designate a product characteristic" is not analyzed, but rather "the author's product, developed by her".

The judge also considered that directing the search results to the defendant company's website causes user confusion, "diluting the brand or depreciating the victim's professional image."



Precedents
Claudio Godoy cited a precedent from the Superior Court of Justice, Special Appeal 510.885, in which the court said that "the improper use of another's trademark is always presumed to be harmful to those to whom the law confers ownership". In REsp 710.376, the STJ defined that, “in the case of misuse of a brand, with the intention of causing confusion to the consumer, the predominant understanding of this Court is that the simple violation of the law implies the obligation to compensate the damage”.