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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
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!
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.
Because it is not cut and dried. You can't just search for "SkyDrive" and then be safe. "Sky" claims it owns anything that starts with "Sky" in the same way that Microsoft claimed "Windows," and Apple claimed the letter "i"! (though they lost in the end... uh, at least in Australia?)
No one in UK apart from a stupid judge and a bunch of opportunistic lawyers confuses Sky from BSkyB with SkyDrive from Microsoft. Perhaps it should change to easyDrive as no one would confuse a cloud service with a car hire company either.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
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.
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?
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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.