The Lamest Lawsuit We’ve Effen Ever Heard Of….

A year ago, my colleague Katie Hafner wrote a story about the growing number of lawsuits facing Google. The cases ranged from copyright claims, to challenges to Google’s use of other companies’ trademarks in its advertising system, to complaints about how some Web sites were ranked in Google’s search results.

It now looks like some people took the story’s headline — We’re Google. So Sue Us. — a bit too literally.

Last week, a Pennsylvania resident sued Google in federal court alleging that his Social Security number turned upside down and scrambled spells the name Google. In a handwritten complaint, the defendant, Dylan Stephen Wayne, asks for $5 billion in damages.

Now word comes of another case, this one filed in federal district court in Texas last week, alleging that Google stole its name from the Gogo tribe of Tanzania. The suit was filed by Denis Maringo, who according to the complaint is an immigration detainee at the CCA Houston Processing Center, allegedly detained for political reasons. Google rival Yahoo is also a defendant in this case, based on allegations that the Internet portal stole its name from the Yao tribe of Tanzania. In the complaint, Mr. Maringo claims that his paternal grandfather was a Gogo and his maternal grandmother was a Yao.

The suit asks for a permanent injunction barring the defendants from using the names Google and Yahoo, and for $10,000 in damages for each Gogo and Yao tribal member. TechDirt has a copy of the complaint, as well as some more background on this and the Pennsylvania case.

What does Google say about its name? It comes from googol, the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros.

That may also come to be a measure of how many different claims can be invented against a company with such deep pockets.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/whats-in-googles-name/