Executives at Le Google's California headquarters are shouting "Zut!" at the recent French judicial decision - surely to be appealed - that presumes the search giant to be responsible for policing the world's many trademarks. But they are apparently less philosophical about the treachery committed by their French subsidiary. It seems Le Google France has not only done a poor job of helping defend the search engine, but is trying to fix the blame on the parent company who unilaterally developed the technology in question.

A French reporter for ZDnet, missing the point about it being impossible to act as a trademark cop for the world, calls Le Google's entry into the paid listings market without word-by-word trademark legal review "an embarrassing - and potentially damaging - blunder."

The keywords in question "bourse des vols," French for "flight market," were trademarked by a guy named Fabrice Dariot running an online travel agency. The ZDnet account states that the Frenchman was "understandably" offended when he found other travel services using the term d'art for different brands and different purposes.

Trademarks are enforced only when infringed within the relevant market space, so anticipating this sort of problem would require not just a database hookup to the hundreds of national trademark registries, but also a human legal review of each keyword purchase. Even then, a high proportion of keywords would fall into an ambiguous category, where they would probably not constitute cases of infringement, yet would also not guarantee freedom from litigation.

The French Google subsidiary has told the court that the Americans should be sued in their stead. It maintains that it is a corporate regime held hostage by a set of strict policies defined by foreign fiat. It's not really their fault.