A court has ruled that a lawsuit brought against Yahoo! owned Overture for displaying ads for competitors when a trademark was entered as a search-term is “totally without merit”.

The case was brought when the owner of a London based catering business, Victor Wilson, sued Yahoo! UK, and Overture for trademark infringement by placing sponsored links from other companies in search results for the trademarked name ‘Mr. Spicy’.

Mr. Justice Morgan, accepted Yahoo’s argument that their use of the term did not amount to trademark infingement, saying..

“The trade mark in this case is not used by anyone other than the browser who enters the phrase ‘Mr Spicy’ as a search query in the defendants’ search engine. In particular, the trade mark is not used by the defendants. The response of the defendants to the use of the trade mark by the browser is not use of the trade mark by the defendants… …That is enough to decide the case in the defendants’ favour. But the matter does not stop there. If, by some process of reasoning, one were to hold that the search engine’s response to the words used by the browser was, itself, use by the defendants, in my judgement, it is not use of the mark ‘Mr Spicy’. What, instead, is being used is the English word ’spicy’ as it appears in that phrase.”

Wilson, who is either uneducated in the way keyword-search works, or a money-grabbing opportunist, has nevertheless lost his futile battle with the search giant, and will have to bid for relevent keywords like everybody else.