关键词广告买卖构成商标侵权与否的法律审查

The Legal Examination of whether the Keyword Advertising Business Constitutes Trademark Infringement

对于关键词广告买卖行为是否构成商标侵权这个问题,持否定态度者和持肯定态度者分别侧重于保护消费者免受欺诈和保护商标权人对标志广告宣传、商誉承载之使用的专有权益。虽然这两种对立观点反映了新的利益冲突与利益分配诉求,但尚未达到对既有社会关系产生重大影响,从而突破了现行商标法律制度调整范畴,需要制定新的法律予以应对的程度。因此,在现有商标法律制度、法律解释和法律理论足以解决相关问题的情况下,本文对关键词广告买卖是否构成商标侵权的认定如下:仅仅将商标作为搜索关键词使用不属于商标使用行为;这种行为不会造成消费者混淆,仅仅可能造成消费者的注意力转移;这种行为并未夺取商标权人在自然搜索结果中通过使用商标标识来源可预期获得的商业机会,不会损害商标权人的市场利益。

As to the issues whether the keyword advertising constitutes trademark infringement,those positive views and negative views respectively focus on protecting consumers from fraud and protecting trademark owner’s exclusive rights in making use of marks in advertising as well as bearing goodwill.Although these two opposing views reflect the new interest conflict and the new need to distribute interests,they have not yet have a significant impact on existing social relations to the extent that breakthrough the regulation scope of current trademark law system,thus lawmakers have to enact new legislation to deal with it.Therefore,considering the current trademark law system,legal interpretation and legal theory are sufficient to solve the related problems,with regard to the issue whether the keyword advertising business constitutes trademark infringement,this paper holds that,merely using a trademark as a searching keyword is not trademark use;the conduct can not cause consumers confusion,it may only cause consumers to divert their attention;the conduct will not deprive the business opportunities of the trademark owners that expect to obtain via using the trademark to identify the commodity source in search engines’natural searched results,and not damage the trademark rightholder’s market interests.