Premium Watchmaker Sues Amazon for Misleading Search Results – Modern

In a Monday ruling, the USA Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit said that online retail giant Amazon will face a trademark-infringement lawsuit filed against it by Multi Time Machine (MTM), a Los Angeles-based manufacturer of military-style watches.

The appeals court in San Francisco reversed a lower court ruling and said high-end watchmaker Multi Time Machine Inc.is entitled to a trial on its trademark allegations. The company alleges that Amazon is violated its trademark by showing the name of the product below the search box when someone searches for MTM Special Ops, and then displaying a competing product in the search results.

An Amazon representative could not immediately be reached for comment.

As Reuters reports, The argument MTM is making isn’t that Amazon is simply offering alternatives to its wares – it’s that there’s no indication that the site doesn’t sell MTM products at all.

MTM alleged this could cause customers to buy from one of those competitors, rather than encouraging the shopper to look for MTM watches elsewhere.

According to Engadget, Amazon previously faced-and lost-a similar lawsuit from cosmetics retailer Lush, for showing results from other companies when customers used the search term “Lush”.

The panel held that a jury could find that Amazon had created a likelihood of confusion under an “initial interest confusion” theory, and as such the place for the dispute was back in the district court.

The court’s dissenting opinion, penned by Judge Barry Silverman, notes that people who frequent Amazon probably would not be misled by the scope of the search results.