Shoemoney Sues Google Employee for AdWords TOS Violation

Shoemoney’s Jeremy Schoemaker is hot on the heels of a Google employee who owned a website which uses Shoemoney’s patented keyword “Shoemoney” on his AdWords ad campaign to direct traffic towards the site myincentivewebsite.com

Shoemoney found out about the issue 4 months ago, when he noticed that an ad for Shoemoney was directing towards the domain myincentivewebsite.com. When Schoemaker investigated the site, he could not contact the site owner since the site’s contact information was set in “private”. This prompted Schoemaker to seek for a court’s subpoena addressed to the webhost of the said site, demanding that the company discloses the information of the site’s owner.

In short Schoemaker found out the name of the site owner and later on also found out that the site owner was a Google employee working as an AdWords Account Strategist. Call it faith or conincidence, but isn’t that the source of the issue? The defendant even claimed that he was unaware that his site maybe violating any Google TOS or even using Schoemaker’s trademark.

Knowing that he was not able to convince Schoemaker, the dependent even sent a screenshot of his AdWords account and a list of keywords he was targeting for his ad campaign.

From then on, Schoemaker knew that something is not right. Then a after a few more investigation, the dependent was found out to be a Google employee.

But even with a court case, the dependent continuous to believe that he did not violate any part of the Google TOS. Either the employee was playing dumb or he/she doesn’t really whether there was a violation of the Google TOS.

Danny Sullivan has an excellent wrap up of this on Search Engine Land.