Cheating Getting Sued By Google 101

Law blog Infamy or Praise warns me that I could get sued for my AdWords stunt because I asked readers not to click on my ad.

California law, which, according to the AdWords Program Terms, applies to Anderson's transaction with Google, implies a covenant of good faith and fair dealing in all contracts between parties entered into in the State of California. Does Anderson's request violate this implied covenant?

....I think Anderson's on shaky legal ground driving prospective ad-clickers away from his ads and denying Google their reasonably-anticipated AdWords revenues from him.

So, if my guess is correct and Anderson's in breach of his implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing with Google, what's his liability? Since this is Google and not Microsoft with which he's dealing, it's unlikely that Anderson will be half-hung, drawn and quartered. The Program Terms disclaim "consequential, special, indirect, exemplary, punitive and other damages" and provide that Anderson's probable liability would be measured by Google's lost per-click values. As Anderson cheerfully admits, his ad "sucks"; Google's losses due to his passing interference with his audience's natural ad-clicking tendencies are almost certainly negligible. A measure of damages more to Google's liking might be that suggested in a comment to Anderson's post: "Chris, how much will you pay us not to click on your ad?"

Read the whole post, especially the fun part at the end when he notes my comment that the actual benefit of my ads is probably close to zero: "It wouldn't take much legal woe to create an actual detriment somewhere south of zero." I think he's joking.

Comments

[Ted Demopoulos]

Google is far more likely to throw you out of the AdWords program!

Don't be surprised to get a generic message from Google saying your AdWords account is terminated, with probably little if any explanation.

Google is judge, jury and executioner in this case, as with their AdSense program. After all, AdWords and AdSense are theirs and they can run them as they like.

[dthree]

I can't imagine they would actually sue, because saying its detrimental to them is kind of circular logic. Telling your readers not to click the ads is not losing google any clicks because they are already here.

[adguru]

This is so old. Google won't suspend your account or anything, they simply stop displaying poorly performing ads. So after a week or so, if your ad fails to get a certain small amount of click throughs, it is automatically dropped.

You won't get any where close to a decent amount of exposure before your ad stops showing up. This is so....2003 :)