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Microsoft Will Have To Rename SkyDrive
SmartAboutThings writes "A month ago, Microsoft was involved in a legal battle in the United Kingdom, when the court found that there was a conflict between Microsoft's SkyDrive and a trademark owned by the British Sky Broadcasting Group (BSkyB). Back then, the UK court ruled that Microsoft was infringing the BSkyB's trademark. And now we have confirmation that Microsoft will be forced to change the SkyDrive brand name. This is quite a big branding issue for Microsoft. What are they going to call it? DriveSky? And chances are that the name change will be worldwide and not only in the United Kingdom."
or just F-Drive; C and D are your disk drives; E is the USB drive; so F-Drive is the Cloud storage drive letter.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Data in, nothing out.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
MeTooDrive or Me2Drive. Since Microsoft only copies things that others do at this point, they should just grab the Me2 prefix to replace the G or i from all of Google's and Apple's products.
NSADrive !!!!!
Synonyms: blast, breath, breeze, draft, heavens, ozone, puff, sky, stratosphere, troposphere, ventilation, waft, whiff, wind, zephyr
ZephyrDrive, PuffDrive, BreezeDrive
This happened before with the XBox name. It is difficult to believe that a company like Microsoft, bolstered by batteries of lawyers with copyright, patent, and trademark expertise, could have pulled such a boneheaded move. Were they playing legal chicken with the Brits, or did they really, truly screw up?
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Fixed with one easy change of letter: SpyDrive.
The arrogance of a big player is punished when deserved.
Because Sky Broadcasting is such a small timer...
No arrogance here, just the assumption that people could tell the difference between a media conglomerate with an overreaching opinion of its' self worth and some cloud service.
Yes, obviously, one company should own a trademark on any product containing the work "Sky" in it.
Murdoch vs Microsoft, IMHO Murdoch is worse. At least Microsoft isn't actively trying to subvert political processes through media control.
How many Microsoft SkyDrive users will be confused by the rename of this product and switch to Dropbox?
Both.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
'cept in this case it seems that its simply the word 'Sky' that is supposedly trademarked. Sky Broadcasting does not offer any similar services in any markets, hence they are claiming the word itself. The closest thing they are associated with is that Sky Broadcasting owns a subsidiary company that has a wifi hotspot service. That companies name is The Cloud.
What the summary doesnt make clear is that Microsoft and BSkyB reached a secret settlement on the matter.
"His name was James Damore."
What is interesting is that BSkyB doesn't have a "SkyDrive" product but many products named "Sky" that are in the same product category.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Microsoft Cloud Drive Storage Home Edition
Microsoft Cloud Drive Storage Premium Edition
Microsoft Cloud Drive Storage Enterprise Edition
Same thing happened with GMail in Germany, and with the iPhone in Brazil. With each country having their own system for registering trademarks, it becomes problematic to come up with a name that doesn't infringe on anybody else's trademark. There really should be a single, global registry for all trademarks, because, with the internet, every business is a global business.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
>chances are that the name change will be worldwide and not only in the United Kingdom
I doubt that very much.
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
Microsoft must have realized that arguing "Sky" is a generic word, so is "Windows". That means they'd be shooting themselves in the foot by arguing that Sky (and thus Windows) isn't trademark-able.
What about Skype?
It's old and established name for a product but it's run by Microsoft now, are they forced to rebrand it too?
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Just like one company claiming a trademark on any product starting with lower-case "i'.
Why do I see all of the anti-MS posts? Yeah, MS has been a bastard many times, but to be swatted because they dared to use the term "sky" for their product when some other company that doesn't make anything close to the same product also used "sky" in their names is asinine. I'm sure Sky has been used in product names and company names before bskyb. You're an idiot if you think this is just fine.
I'm seeing a bit too much anti-Microsoft bias here. If we weren't talking about Microsoft I'm pretty sure we'd all be outraged by that court's decision, especially given the reaction on Slashdot to similar cases in the past.
Where was Microsoft irresponsible here? Who in their right mind would have thought that SkyDrive infringed on British Sky Broadcasting Group? Does any company or service with "sky" in the name also infringe? What about SkyTrain? Or Delta Sky Miles?
I fail to see how Microsoft did anything wrong here.
I've done naming for companies in the past and it can be an excruciating process. I'm pretty sure a company as big as Microsoft isn't cavalier about naming. If my clients are any indication, their own lawyers are a huge pain in the ass for the internet teams to deal with. They're specifically paid to be thorough and attuned to every little risk. I can't imagine how much more difficult it will be now coming up with a new name with the heightened sensitivity to even the remotest of infringement. I certainly wouldn't want to be on that naming team.
"Grossly exaggerating" the power of "media barons", think about that for a second. Think about what you just wrote.
This is the same company changed the name of its "passport" service a ludicrous amount of times:-
.NET Passport, Microsoft Passport Network, and most recently Windows Live ID)"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_account
"Microsoft Account (previously Microsoft Wallet, Microsoft Passport,
I'd have said that MS's stupidly confusing naming is marketing-over-clarity, but *it's not even good marketing!!* I bet the man on the street doesn't have a clue what MS's constantly-changing brands-of-the-week are supposed to mean to him anyway, beyond being a confusing and counter-productive mish-mash of pseudo-terminology.
The quintessential ironic example of how MS just don't get it was their (then-)latest media-player compatibility scheme called "Plays for Sure" which obviously implied Apple-style "no brainer just works" straightforwardness. They proceeded to totally undermine this by renaming it to tie in with "Certified for Windows Vista" (which also encompassed other schemes) and launched a separate, incompatible DRM/compatibility scheme for their now-defunct Zune range. Does anyone know (or care) what MS's attention-deficit clusterf*** of overlapping brands are supposed to mean?!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Don't you mean Sky.NET?
/* No Comment */
They could go with the highly successful WindowsRT campaign and call it "DriveRT"
That fact that a corporation can hijack language and have an artificial monopoly on a word is bullshit to begin with.
No it isn't. Trade mark is reputation. Without it, you could buy something labeled Coca Cola and get municipal tap water.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's not on BSkyB,
BSkyB is a shortform for British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC.
They use "Sky" in branding for all sorts of stuff, notably Sky Broadband and Sky Subscriber Services (which is their TV offering).
In that context, an internet cloud service calling itself Sky-something sounds like it's part of the Sky services, which it of course isn't. And Microsoft has no real claim on the 'Sky' brand, so they're SOL.
I hope you knew BSkyB own "The Cloud" too :)
http://www.thecloud.net/