Argos goes to the Court of Appeal but leaves empty handed
Aargh, gosh we lost the appeal! Can a US corporation selling construction software only in the Americas under the name ARGOS be sued for infringement of a registered trade mark by a UK based consumer goods retailer who trades mainly in the UK and Ireland under the same name? This question is posed by Floyd LJ in the introduction to the Court of Appeal decision on the Argos Ltd v Argos Systems Inc [2018] EWCA Civ 2211 . The formulation of the question may make it easy to guess the Court of Appeal's ultimate decision. Background The IPKat report on the High Court decision is available here . Broadly speaking, the dispute concerns the domain name argos.com and Google's AdSense programme. Floyd LJ handily describes this programme as follows: Google AdSense allows website operators to contract with Google to provide space on members' ("partners'") websites to display advertisements ("ads" for short). Google has a further programme known as AdWords, whic...