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Rosetta Stone Sues Google For Trademark Violation
adeelarshad82 writes that earlier this week "Rosetta Stone, Inc. filed a lawsuit against Google Inc in a US federal court, alleging trademark infringement. In the lawsuit, the company alleged that Google is allowing third parties, including individuals involved in software piracy, to purchase the right to use its trademarks — or other 'confusingly similar' terms — in Google's Adwords advertising program."
So, Rosetta Stone Inc wants to sue Google for Trademark Violation. How about the British Museum, which holds the real Rosetta Stone, sues this upstart for using Rosetta Stone as it's trademark? Or the Egyptian government, which certainly has a better claim on the stone, which was looted by the Brits in the 1870's? Given all the confusion that already exists because this translation company has appropriated to itself the name Rosetta Stone, when there also exist the real Rosetta Stone, "The Rosetta Stone of immunology", "Arabidopsis, the Rosetta Stone of flowering time (fossils)", an algorithm for predicting protein structure from sequence is named Rosetta@home, and in molecular biology, a series of "Rosetta" bacterial cell lines have been developed that contain a number of TRNA genes that are rare in E. coli but common in other organisms, enabling the efficient translation of DNA from those organisms in E. coli. "Rosetta" is also an online language translation tool to help localisation of software, developed and maintained by Canonical as part of the Launchpad project, "Rosetta" is the name of a "lightweight dynamic translator" distributed for Mac OS X by Apple that enables applications compiled for a RISC processor (PowerPC) to run on Apple systems using a CISC (x86) processor. The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone to last from 2000 to 12,000 AD. Its goal is a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,500 languages. As well as being the name of the original Rosetta Stone, the term has come to mean something critical to decryption or translation. Rosetta Stone Inc should be ashamed of themselves...
For those who skimmed TFA:
Last month, Google changed its policy stating that "advertisers will be allowed to use trademark terms in their ad text even if they do not own that trademark or have explicit approval from the trademark owner to use it," Rosetta Stone said
The problem is NOT Google infringing upon the trademarks that Rosetta Stone holds. The issue is that Google is now willingly allowing Joe Schmuck, a competitor, to use trademarks to their own benefit. This seems like a pretty obvious infringement issue. I'm confused though, as to why Google JUST now started to allow this. If it was a no-brainer back when Adwords started, wouldn't they have allowed it at that point? Sounds to me like Adwords revenue was down, and allowing the use of non-approved trademarks in ads made the Adsword space that much more appealing in hopes of getting people off the fence when evaluating their advertising budget.
Why is it that we let companies trademark words which are already in the common lexicon?
Not to defend the Rosetta Stone's asinine lawsuit here, but trademark law (in theory) only lets companies control pre-existing words to the extent that they identify its product. Trademark law does not let them restrict all uses of the mark.
So Rosetta Stone company's trademark does not prevent you from saying things like,
"I visited the Rosetta Stone."
"Bob is as helpful to us as the Rosetta Stone was for egyptologists!"
or even
"Taking the Berlitz foreign language course was like finding the Rosetta Stone for me!"
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
If I walk into a store and ask the clerk, "where's the Rosetta Stone software" the shelf he will direct me to has the competing software RIGHT NEXT to it, perhaps with stickers bragging how much better it is than Rosetta.
Trying to get your software to show up when somebody googles a competitor is the same thing.
And if you think it is different because they are paying Google for it, the same thing happens in stores(pay-for-placement on shelves) and in newspaper ads. Every magazine I've dealt(admittedly only a dozen or so) with let me buy an ad on the facing page from a competitor's ad, some would even call me up pro-actively if I'd bought space from them before.