While a decent amount of attention has been given this week to Google's Gmail trademark issues in the U.K., most of the articles have been somewhat skewed in favor of the search giant. Reporters and bloggers have talked about the "exorbitant" amount of money that Independent International Investment Research CEO Shane Smith has requested to give up the trademark. Few articles have looked at things from Smith's side.

In an open letter to Gmail users in today's Times Online, Smith tries to share his side of the story.

We launched our G-mail service in Spring 2002, two years before Google announced its own, and although our marketing efforts have produced results more slowly than we had hoped, G-mail remains at the core of our growth strategy. As a public company, we have responsibilities to our shareholders to protect our assets.

Sure, we didn't register the trade mark before we launched our product - but neither did Google before it launched its own. Our excuse is that we are small, and lack resources sometimes to do things the way we would like.

The problem is that our audience is a sub-set of Google's. From frequent experience, when I see a new client now, the opening questions concern how we are related to Google, given our big and bold "G-Mail" button. When I explain that we aren't, there is a residual taste that somehow, we are improperly using Google's intellectual property. In our business, we cannot afford any suggestion of impropriety.

Google broke off negotiations with us when we indicated that the minimum deal that we could accept, to transfer our entire rights to the trade mark, would be an annual licence at US$500,000 (FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND US DOLLARS) per year (which is the real cost to Google) plus the same amount in advertising credits, to help us to re-brand our service. To put that in perspective, we believe that there are currently around 5m Gmail users globally - so assuming that this user-base never grows when the service is out of beta (which is clearly unrealistic), the cost per user is ten cents per year.

Read the full letter at the Times Online.