Slashdot Mirror
Apple Denied Trademark For 'Multi-Touch'
suraj.sun sends this excerpt from MacRumors:
"In a decision handed down by the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Apple has been denied an application for a trademark on Multi-Touch. ... For trademarks, 'the greater the degree of descriptiveness the term has, the heavier the burden to prove it has attained secondary meaning.' The trademark attorney pointed out that the term 'multitouch' has taken on generic meaning, being used by a wide variety of publications to describe the touchscreen technology on Android phones, tablets, and notebooks."
How could Apple try to trademark 'Multi-touch' with a straight face?
This is like Ford trying to trademark 'Four-wheel drive' or Sony trying to trade mark 'Entertainment Center'.
Blatantly trying to abuse the system like this should warrant a paddling.
Considering a near three-decade long history of Multi touch RnD (starting with University of Toronto, followed by Bell Labs and Xerox, et al...) a patent awarded to apple would be quite a spit in the face of everyone who made the technology possible in the first place.
Strangely enough, this story had nothing to do with patents at all. The only thing "patent" about it is the P in the USPTO acronym, but that's not what this is about. This is about the T, which is the Trademark portion of their office.
Not only did the summary say "trademark" but the article title even used the word "trademark." Feel free to yell about patents in context, but for now, this isn't it.
John
You know, there's a very simple solution to that:
Allow people to file amicus curiae-style briefs on any pending patent. Bored Slashdot posters alone would be filing "examples of prior art" for pretty much everything.
What does MultiTouch as a trademark even mean? Apple doesn't sell "MultiTouch" phones, they sell iPhones. And sure, those iPhones are Multi-Touch iPhones, but they're also BatteryBased, can connect to WiFi, and HaveColor. They don't even make the screens themselves.
It's not like they're trying to trademark a business mark they're going to engage in trade under. It's a mark for, essentially, an advertising branding of a component they didn't even make. That's like Microsoft trademarking the START Menu. Or me trademarking ImWearingPants.
The ______ Agenda
Unfortunately, 99.9% of that "prior art" wouldn't actually fit the patent claims, and would be more along the lines of "art that does a similar job differently, and probably happened before the patent". The remaining 0.1% would be mostly things already included in the patent as prior art, but the submitter didn't bother to check that.
Any time someone suggests letting the public handle anything important directly, I think of 4chan.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.