A Chennai-based start-up company Flintobox, a provider of kids’ activity boxes, sent a legal notice to Amazon for alleged unlawful diversion of traffic to Amazon’s website by using their brand name.

Flintobox has already sent a “cease-and-desist” notice to Amazon claiming damages of 10 lakhs INR. According to Flintobox, anyone typing the word ‘Flintobox’ in Google search engine found “Flintobox at Amazon” as the first result in the form of a sponsored advertisement, which on further clicking would give no information of Flintobox products. Rather, it would display products by other companies similar to Flintobox.

The word, “Flintobox” has been a trademark of the company for over 2 years. The company first raised a complaint with Amazon in July 2016 and then again in October 2016. However, it received only automated responses from Amazon, according to official statements. Amazon did not take any action despite complaints, according to Flintobox, and that it had to provide documents to Google to stop the advertisement. Google, however, later changed to the word “Flinto box” in the advertisement thus not agreeing to completely remove the advertisement since the word with a space was not trademarked. Flintobox claimed that they have decided to take legal action against Amazon after failing to get any response from Amazon over the issue.

The CEO of Flintobox stated in a recent blog, titled Google And Amazon – The Sharks That Are Stealing Nemo’s Food #WakeUpAmazon, stated that “Amazon, the biggest online retailer on planet Earth, used Google to steal a prospective buyer of Flintobox, and instead introduced them to some of their (rather irrelevant) products.”

Some search engine optimization technicians and IP experts have also pointed out the possibility of unintentional infringement owing to the automated system used by Amazon that might have picked up phrases for Google Ad words without realizing it being a brand name. Hence the complexity of the case is quite visible, especially because of a generation of a keyword being a brand name, by a software.

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