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Verbing Weirds Google

Posted by timothy on from the stupid-lawyer-tricks dept.

MoNickels writes "Back in January, the American Dialect Society voted the neologism "to google" as the most useful word of 2002. Now bring on the lawyers! Google's have sent a cease-and-desist letter to Paul McFedries, creator of the famous Word Spy site, demanding he remove google as a verb from his lexicon, or else. Frank Abate, an American editor for the Oxford English Dictionary, points out, however, that you can't claim proprietary rights to a verb." Update: 02/26 03:19 GMT by T : MoNickels writes with an update: "Frank Abate is not an editor of the OED, but he is a former editor of the New Oxford American Dictionary, both published by Oxford University Press." Thanks for the amendment!

3 of 766 comments (clear)

  1. Re:never work by aiken_d · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, Hormel has given up on the spam thing. They used to say that it was OK to use the work in lower case to refer to junk email, but would actively contact and even threaten folks using it in its capitalized form. However, they've apparently decided that any publiclity is good publicity.

    Google's intent here is clearly to protect their trademark -- they don't really have a choice. If they aquiesce and agree that "to google" is a generic word and not a brand reference, you can bet that Inktomi and Overture-those-fraudulent-bastards-it's-a-classifi ed-ad-engine-not-a-search-engine will call their offerings "Googlers" or something similar. Which would be a moral victory for Google, but perhaps a commercial disaster.

    Cheers
    -b

    --
    If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
  2. Its not a Cease and Desist! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    READ THE LETTER!


    This is just a "request" from a lawyer:


    "....We ask that you help us to protect our brand by deleting the definition of
    "google" found at wordspy.com or revising it to take into account the
    trademark status of Google."


    Lawyers do this all time. You have the option of saying "No".


    It is NOT a Cease and Desist letter.


    thanks Timothy for more FUD.

  3. Spam vs spam, and Google vs google by ahecht · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hormel has stated that people can use the term spam to refer to junk mail as long as they don't capitalize it, so I think Google should do the same (so the verb would be "to google", not "to Google").