Google Has No AdSense

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from Wired News
The owners of the domain adsense.com have been fielding hundreds of customer service e-mails and phone calls regarding Google's AdSense program since the advertising service launched in March 2003.

Unfortunately for the domain registrants, they have no connection with Google, except for the fact that they happen to share the name.

Alexis Garrett, marketing director and co-founder of AdSense Consulting, a Eugene, Oregon-based marketing and design company, registered the URL in 1996. Call the number listed until recently on adsense.com, and she'll likely answer the phone. But she'd rather you didn't, unless you're an actual prospective customer.

"I don't want hundreds of people calling me," Garrett said. "I just want the two or three that are a good match for the services we provide. This has been overwhelming."

On an afternoon in late May, Garrett said she had already fielded five Google AdSense calls.

For Garrett's AdSense -- a company with three full-time employees and housed in a small brick office building -- the barrage of misdirected communication recently reached a tipping point: She sold the domain in September 2005 through a private broker to an as-yet-unnamed buyer.

The new owner won't take over adsense.com until around September 2006. In the meantime, a placeholder redirects customers to the company's new site. Both old and new sites feature a bitter message in italics: "If you think you can get rich quick placing other people's ads on your site or blog, please contact Google who has taken and used our business name without permission or compensation."

Google would not comment on questions about the Oregon-based company, except to confirm it did not buy the domain name adsense.com.

Regarding problems Google has caused the small company, Google's AdSense representative Brandon McCormick said, "I just don't have anything to say on it."

When Google's website-relevant ad service launched in 2003, Garrett wasn't totally put off, even though it had the same name and spelling as the company she co-created.

"At first I thought, 'OK, maybe it won't be a bad thing. Maybe it will bring me business, it will raise the awareness of my word, of my name,'" she said.

Actually, the opposite has happened. Due to an influx of, at one point, thousands of spam messages a day, she felt forced to remove her site's e-mail link from clients' web pages. She has lost business, she said, by way of busy phone lines, inadvertently trashed e-mails and distraction from her business.

"I'm spending so much time telling people what we do not do instead of what we do do, and that is costly," she said.

Sick of those losses, Garrett sold the domain for an undisclosed amount that she said covers expenses incurred from having to replace things like company stationery, brochures and business cards. She said she doesn't know who bought the domain, but that a clause in the sale contract stipulated it could not be used for anything related to gambling, adult content or actions that are "questionably ethical."

Garrett said she did ask Google representatives if they wanted to buy the domain. They declined by e-mail in November 2004. But Google's apparent disinterest is tempered by the fact that it owns similar domains, including adsense.net and adwords.com.

AdSense Consulting's new domain is adsense2.com -- and that simple change, made about a month ago, has cut down on a lot of the mistaken-identity issues, Garrett said.

Garrett said she considered taking legal action against Google, but couldn't afford to pay lawyers. She said she hasn't ruled out a lawsuit, though.

AdSense does not hold a federal trademark on its name, while Google does. Garrett did, however, register the name with the Oregon Secretary of State's Office, which is required for Oregon businesses registered under names different from their owners'.

Twila Coakley, manager of business registration for the Oregon Secretary of State's Office, said that while the registration doesn't necessarily equal ownership of the name, it's a good record to have if there's a dispute over who has the right to use the name.

"The courts often look at who used it first," she said, although the outcome of a case is never completely predictable.

Not registering a trademark with the federal registry doesn't mean a business is powerless, said Corynne McSherry, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But that can make it difficult to go after a business that has the same name trademarked.

"If you have an unregistered mark you've been using for years and someone else has a registered mark, you might pursue an unfair-competition claim," she said.

In an attempt to take advantage of the windfall of attention to her site, Garrett said she tried to sign up adsense.com for Google's AdSense program about a year and a half ago. Ironically, her site was rejected, she said.

"It basically said my site didn't meet their qualifications to participate in the AdSense program," she said.

can't understand how google would have much of a leg to stand on? she's been using the name since 1995, and has had the URL since 1996... a long time before Google came up with the idea/concept of AdSense :confused:
 
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