Google’s email service is finally returning to its original Gmail branding in the UK after a four-year absence, after Google settled a trademark dispute.
Google paid £226,324 for the intellectual property rights for Gmail to a small UK-based financial research firm, Independent International Investment Research.
In October 2005, Google was forced to rename its free webmail service Google Mail in the UK after IIIR claimed first dibs on G-mail for its subscription email newsletter to traders and private investors.
IIIR said back then that the Gmail trademark was worth millions. Although the sum it was paid by Google was less than a tenth of the trademark’s purported valuation in 2005, IIIR said the settlement was “considerably in excess of the expenditure incurred” in defending the IP rights. IIIR’s directors considered the settlement “fair and reasonable”, the company said.
I, like some other UK Gmail users, noticed the Gmail logo return today.
Google told me in a statement: “We reached a settlement and are once again able to offer @gmail.com addresses in the UK. The product name will change in all UK inboxes within the upcoming months. This will not change users’ experience and Gmail will continue to offer the same product features as Google Mail.”
A similar dispute remains unresolved in Germany. But Google has much bigger lawsuits on its hands today – not least over Google Books, which also began to occupy its lawyers in 2005.
But the twist in what would otherwise have been a footnote to Google’s British history is that it settled with IIIR over a year ago. Google paid IIIR the £226,324 on July 23, 2008, according to a statement (PDF) issued by the research firm last September.
The unanswered question is, why would it take an organisation as technically well-resourced as Google almost 15 months to change a logo?
