On June 10, 2022, the Paris court ruled that Amazon had violated the Carré Blanc trademark by implementing a “tortuous SEO strategy”.
Concerning natural referencing, the documents submitted to the court showed that certain Google ads reproduced the “Carré Blanc” trademark visibly for the Internet user (and therefore for the consumer) in the URL addresses and the titles, whereas “no authentic product was offered for sale on the pages accessible by clicking on the links indicated by the disputed URLs”. The Paris court, therefore, considered that there was trademark infringement:
“The use of the “CARRE BLANC” trademark in the title, URL, or even the description of the disputed pages has made it possible to increase the natural referencing of these pages and, therefore, the traffic induced by raising their appearance in the search results, even though no authentic product was offered there, which constitutes a prohibited practice”.
As for paid referencing, the court noticed the purchase of the keywords “carré”, “blanc” and “carré blanc” on the search engines Bing.fr and Yahoo.com. The court considered it a question of use as a trademark constituting trademark infringement, the Internet user being “led to believe that he could obtain authentic products when in the end he was only offered competing products”.
The court, therefore, ruled that Amazon had violated Carré Blanc’s trademarks. However, the court considered that Carré Blanc had not provided elements “to determine any economic damage”, so no compensation was awarded in this respect. The court only granted 15,000 euros for the moral damage.
Concerning one specific item, the court recalled the following points:
– “the fact that the product is indicated to be sold by a third party is not sufficient to rule out the risk that the public could imagine that it is an authentic product sold by a distributor” of the trademark owner;
– “the liability [of Amazon] is likely to be engaged as a host if it appears that it has not remedied this situation after having been duly informed by Carré Blanc, being reminded that the host is presumed to know the content and their manifestly illicit nature upon receipt of the notification under article 6-I-5 of the law on trust in the digital economy”.
In this case, it turns out that Carré Blanc had not notified Amazon of the infringing nature of the page in question.
In 2019, Carré Blanc had already won its case against Rueducommerce for similar facts (iptwins.com, 2019-07-13).
Source: Court of Justice of Paris, First instance, 3rd ch., 2nd. sect., June 10, 2022 (legalis.net).
