Chinese company takes Google to court

BEIJING: A Chinese company has taken Google's China operations to court over what it says is an infringement of the Chinese translation of its name, "Guge" a court document said.

According to the case, which was heard by a court in Beijing this week, Beijing Guge Sci-Tech Co was officially registered at the Beijing Municipal Industrial and Commercial Bureau on April 19, 2006, but Google didn't register the name "Guge" in China until November 24 of that year.

Beijing Guge Sci-Tech says sharing the same name has caused misunderstandings with the public and disturbed its business with people who confuse the company with Google.

The Chinese company is demanding Google change its Chinese name and pay all its legal costs, according to the court document seen by The Associated Press on Friday. No specific sum was mentioned.

The document said that Google said in its defense that when Beijing Guge Sci-Tech registered its name there were already reports on the Internet that Google was going to use the Chinese name "Guge".

There was no immediate response from Google's office in China. Beijing Guge called the naming a "coincidence", the document said.

Google says the name "Guge", which is not a normal Chinese word, was created by the Beijing-based company. The Chinese characters mean "valley" and "song" and Google said that represents songs from Silicon Valley.

Beijing Guge said it takes the same characters to mean a cuckoo singing in the spring, or the sound of grain singing during the harvest autumn time.