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Google to be Sued Over Name?
WK writes "Now that Google's IPO is running, the company is on the verge of being sued by the family of Professor Edward Kasner who invented the word 'Googol' to describe a very big number. The great-niece of Kasner who was 4 years old at the time her uncle died says that although Google has brought attention to the name, it has not brought attention to Kasner's work. Google was not using the concepts, but just capitalizing on the name."
As the story goes, he was trying to come up with a good name for 10^100. He asked a little kid (some say his nephew) for a name, and the kid responded, "Call it a googol."
This is ridiculous, by the way. It's like the guy who came up with the word "milennium" suing LucasFilm because of Star Wars.
Besides, no one has seen fit to defend the implied trademark (though registered? I'm thinking "not), so I doubt that the lawsuit gets anywhere... I suspect a couple of relatives saw Google's IPO numbers and decided to try at cashing in.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
..though IANAL...
the use of G and an 'o' for each page of search results ending with the 'gle'
this may be a legitimate claim, but it is made completely weak by the circumstances (google's IPO namely) and to my knowledge the term "googol" is in most unabridged dictionaries defining a number of value one with one hundred zeros.
after 12 or 13 sides, regular polygons are named by their prefix and the 'gon' suffix. my favorite one? googolgon. transform!
SIGERR: laziness exceeds quota
You don't see Parket Brothers suing Microsoft of the word "Monopoly".
But seriously, our society is WAY WAY WAY too litigious and opportunistic for anyone's good. On what grounds based in reality does the family of the man who invented the word "Googol" have to the Internet search engine company?
Google even has it's own dictionary entry - two actually, V and N
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
I'm currently studying to become a mathematician; one of the reasons is that the mathematical community has avoided the intellectual-property nonsense that other fields have embraced. Mathematical research is published in public journals and the only sort of "royalty" is attribution; concepts in mathematical papers are not patented and nobody is ever charged for using them. This was probably the deciding factor in my choice between mathematics and computer science -- the sort of behavior that Microsoft and other large companies display is immature, inethical, and all in all inexcusable.
If I recall correctly, I've read an article elsewhere which insinuated that Mr. Kasner's niece is a professional intellectual property litigator of the shadiest manner -- the sort that tries to slip through patents with established prior art and then sue the original inventors. I could be wrong, of course; I've been reading a lot of stuff about the horrendously broken United States IP system and I may be confused.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
Certainly seems to be calling attention to his work, doesn't it?
My poetry site welcomes the unusual.
How can you invent a word?
I'm not sure how things work across the pond (in the USA), but in little old Wales, don't people have to:
a) register a trademark/claim copyright;
and
b) actively protect their claimed Intellectual Property
in order to maintain their rights?
Rather reminds me of a case involving Private Eye (a paper publication akin to "The Onion") and Portakabin a while back...Intel found this out to their cost when clone 486 chips came out. On attempting to sue Cyrix et al, they were unable to prevent them from using the number names. Hence the move to the (trademarked) brand name "Pentium".
What about other word derived terms? Trillian? Is whoever can prove a DNA link to the person who first uttered "million" , "billion", etc going to sue people for refering to someone as a "millionaire"? Or the governments of the world for issuing budgets in billions and trillions?
I may be wrong, and I suppose I shouldn't trust evil Google to check, but I thought the actual name for the number was a "googleplex"? And why aren't they going after GooglePlex Media?
Google is near and dear to a lot of nerds' hearts, mine included. One of my favorite profs in college was a good friend of Brin, and got me started using Google when the whole thing was still beta.
The standard for trademark is confusion in the marketplace. I.e., will consumers be confused about the similarities in the names. E.g., I could legally open an automobile repair facility called McDonalds because consumers would not confuse crappy food with having your car repaired.
From what I gather, Kasner's family has absolutely no business from which consumers could get confused. They're essentially trying to trademark a word merely because a former family member came up with it. That's not the law. Not only will this case get kicked out, the family will be sanctioned for bringing it.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
A couple notes- like others pointed out, they already give Mr. Kasner props.
I heard about this on NPR a couple weeks ago, before any lawsuit was going to happen. The sad thing is that only ONE idiot from the family is really pushing this- when she came on to be interviewed for a couple minutes by NPR, she said: "My sister wanted me to say that it isn't *THE FAMILY* who has a big problem with this, it is *just me.*" No joke- the rest of them are probably embarassed of her actions.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
There is precedence, though: the whole "Microsoft vs Mike Rowe Software" thing. Granted, in this case Mr Rowe's computer-oriented company name sounded just like the larger and more well-known computer-oriented company's name, and there is a potential for confusion. Certainly, there was no malice intended by Mr Rowe, and MSFT offered goodwill items (an Xbox, etc) for the name trade.
Should Google pay for use of a word that sounds similar? Some would say not... if it weren't for Google's claim on the origin of the Google name:
Does this fall under fair use? A lawyer might see this as cause for more financial recognition than just a blurb on the history page.Uh... ignoring for a moment that raw cynicism inherent in that statement, isn't Google running a Dutch Auction IPO partly as a way of eliminating the whole insider/outsider dichotomy? (and partly has a way to make much more money) So the family can't become "insiders" because there won't be any insiders.
Hmmm... perhaps they just mean they want to be given shares of the company pre-IPO (not an "insider" in the traditional IPO sense). That seems even more greedy and cynical to me - there's no gamble involved at all on their part.
Let me get this straight: 60 years ago a mathematician used a different word that's not spelled the same but sounds a bit like google when spoken -- although I'd like the see a pronunciation key for googol -- and now they're claiming that google got their name by drawing on the inifinte wisdom of the bloke the just kinda pulled a word out of his ass to represent 'one million gajillion billions'.
What I want to know is how poor of mathematician was this guy that his crowning contribution to math was the word 'googol'? Or better yet, how incredibly stupid is the son to think his dad's crowning contribution to math is the word 'googol'?
As an aside, do they think it could possibly be the case that google got its name from other words... like maybe:
"go" -- 'to begin an action or motion' M-W
"ogle" -- 'to look at especially with greedy or interested attention' M-W
Hmmm... 'to start looking with interested attention'? That's just silly... of course they got the word from 'one million gajillion billions'.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
When's the revolution...?
:(
It's not going to happen, dude, people don't have a chance against our corporate-backed politicians. Remember, they can now lock you up indefinitely without telling anyone why, they have bigger guns than, and they have Billions of dollars to spend on propaganda.
Main Entry: googol
Pronunciation: 'gü-"gol
Function: noun
Etymology: coined by Milton Sirotta born about 1929 nephew of Edward Kasner died 1955 American mathematician
: the figure 1 followed by 100 zeroes equal to 10^100
Search for Google = No Entry Found.
My (non) legal argument. They are not the same words therfore no case.
besides, can't the family even get it right about who invented the word?
Talking of 'big numbers that existed a priori'...
Did you know that every single digital artwork known to man and yet to be created/discovered exists a priori?
All digital artworks can be represented as one big binary number (typically with a lot more digits than a googol).
Would you therefore use the argument that just because a digitally reprsentable work can be represented as a number from 1 to infintity (and hence exists a priori) that it therefore belongs in the public domain?
I like that idea...
I truly feel the family has no case here. They truly sound like opportunitists trying to make money out of something they could not. To me, the word 'Googol' is nothing more than a symlink to something else. If I were to come up with 'Moogol' for 10^10, and Moogle.com made money, would I sue? No. Despite the play on words, and the inherient meaning, they used nothing else.
Should the Amazon rainforest, or Brazil sue Amazon? No.
Should Half the Planet sue HalfThePlanet.com for their use of the name and reference to those with disabilities? No.
Should keyboard manfacturers sue Slashdot for using a word that describes two keys on their keyboard '/.' Well maybe, but I still say no.
As for not bringing attention to Kesner's work, the attention is in the name and meaning, and it's referenced on the corporate page
http://www.google.com/corporate/index.html
What more does the family want? Money. Isn't there a timeframe also when the word becomes public domain?
Thanks. Looks like I'll be eating my words at least once more....
At least you earned your "informative" my friend.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
What's wrong with that? Some rich guy crashes into your car and damages it - you fight 'em for all the money you get. Some undocumented worker with no money hits you - it's not worth the effort to fight to get him to pay. It's completely sensible to choose how you pick fights with according to how much you can make out of them.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
What really kills me is that Google has acknowledged that their name is a play on the word "googol" since they first appeared. I guess the interested parties never did a google search for Googol (which actually brings up a link for http://www.googol.com...not suing *them*, are they?), or looked at the company's history page.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Anyone else notice the absolute lack of a legal argument in the article?
I don't know about most countries, but in the U.S. at least in theory, you have to sue under the guise of a law or legal principle (common law). I'm not sure exactly which doctrine of law they're appealing to but the most obvious, trademark, applies to words in specific contexts; also they have to be registered and renewed. I doubt these things have been done for the term 10^100.
But you know, everybody's getting rich these days so why not jjump in.
Law: Justice, Truth, and a Growth Industry
Sure you could devise a formal system that allowed you to represent every piece or artwork or whatever, but unfortunately Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem proves that your system will be incomplete. (ie. there will be pieces of artwork that the system cannot describe)
SYS 49152
The total number of particles in the universe is estimated between 10^72 and 10^87. A googol is 13 orders of magnituted higher then that. That means a googol is about 10 trillion times bigger then the numbers of particles in teh universe.
A googolhedron is 10^300 particles so it's 213 orders of magnitutde greater. Even if we raelise the univerese is 100 trillion times smaller then we thought, we're still not even covering a speck of what is needed. Big numbers are stupid that way.
Just some food for thought
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
Googol googol googol googol googol googol googol googol.
Sue me retards...