Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Another Round of G-Mail vs Gmail

Google lost another trademark battle against the German holder of the G-mail trademark, Daniel Giersch, The Register writes:

The Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM), the body which is responsible for European community trademarks, rejected Google’s appeal after a stiff battle with German-born venture capitalist Daniel Giersch.

Giersch, who has held his trademark for six years, has been fighting this battle since Google launched its email service in 2004.

Google already renamed Gmail to Google Mail for German users, though those who registered a *@gmail.com address early on didn’t need to switch to *@googlemail.com.

What’s G-mail anyway? Giersch wants to launch a “hybrid communication” solution at Gmail.de – you can register already to be informed when the service launches nationwide in Germany (right now it’s Beta-tested in the nice lil’ town of Itzehoe). With hybrid communication, G-mail intends to allow others to contact you in a variety of ways, like by fax, snail mail, or electronic mail, and they will then “channel” this message and output it into any other medium, as you prefer. For example, someone in the city of Hamburg can send off a message to Munich. The message will be entered electronically, then transmitted electronically, and then printed out in Munich and transported to the Munich recipient via a local courier service. As a bonus, you’ll even be able to collect a micropayment commission from the price the sender paid...

[Via Search Engine Land. Image by G-mail.de.]

Another Round of G-Mail v ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (7)

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