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Supreme Court Asked To Nullify the Google Trademark (arstechnica.com)
Is the term "google" too generic and therefore unworthy of its trademark protection? That's the question before the US Supreme Court. From a report: What's before the Supreme Court is a trademark lawsuit that Google already defeated in a lower court. The lawsuit claims that Google should no longer be trademarked because the word "google" is synonymous to the public with the term "search the Internet." "There is no single word other than google that conveys the action of searching the Internet using any search engine," according to the petition to the Supreme Court. It's perhaps one of the most consequential trademark case before the justices since they ruled in June that offensive trademarks must be allowed. The Google trademark dispute dates to 2012 when a man named Chris Gillespie registered 763 domain names that combined "google" with other words and phrase, including "googledonaldtrump.com."
to google means to search on google.
I don't know what kind of morons this guy talks to, but I never hear people say google when they mean bing, or yahoo or whatever.
The verb for those is "search".
Like many questions asked on slashdot, the answer should be "No". See Kleenex(TM), Xerox(TM), Band-Aid(TM), etc.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
And that's correct usage among all the cases I've seen.
No one says, "I'm going to google that with SIRI".
No one says, "I'm going to google taht with Bing"
When they say they are going to google something, they mean they are going to use google to search the internet.
Partially, this is because there is a particular quality to google results which other search engines lack.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Chris Gillespie sued and lost so he appealed to the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS), which is his right. However, the justices have not yet ruled on whether they'll even hear his appeal. My guess is they won't hear it and will let the previous ruling (against Gillespie) stand. I do know that one of the ways you can lose a trademark is not to defend it and nobody can accuse Google of doing this.
Coke, Kleenex, Velcro, bandaid, zip lock ....its called good marketing, get over it. They might have a claim on not being able to trademark a number though, so why arnt they pursuing that angle?
Yeah, this would be a great idea. Let's punish a company for being TOO successful in what they do by taking away their trademark protection. Sheesh,
No?
Jeeves just told me this is BS.
I'm sure there are others.
Bing off you binging mother-binger.
google is used as a synonym for search. I hear it all the time.
Like Kleenex is for facial tissue. Q-tip for cotton swab. And more.
I think Google saw it coming and hence that name Alphabet - a completely dumb choice but whatever.
Even if 100% of people use the term "google" interchangeably with "search the internet" (they don't) at least 80% of them actually use Google. The argument that it's a generalized term is untrue and even if it were, that's no reason to invalidate the trademark.
The privacy-preserving search engine, DuckDuckGoogle.
#DeleteChrome
Trademarks have been lost in the past because they have came to describe a product rather than its source. I think Frizbee is one of those: everyone knows what a frizbee is, even if it isn't made by the Frizbee Corp. (or whatever they were called). I think most people know would recognize Google to be the entity that is the source of Gmail, the Android OS and lots of other things, so my bet is that "Google" is safe.
The real question is, however, what is Google willing to do to protect its trademark? The answer is: probably nothing. In an advertising sense, Google benefits from the misuse of its trademark. The corporation could send cease-and-desist letters to every person it can find that misuses the term, but that's cost prohibitive and wouldn't be favored with its customers. Google will probably just pursue the worst offenders so they can go into court and claim they tried.
Google - by itself, as a word - implies nothing about internet search.
Ostensibly, it's a number ( in fact it's a homonym of googol, coined to mean 10^100).
If the summary is correct, essentially they're arguing that Google's market success means they lose their trademark ala generification like kleenex, xerox, etc. But it doesn't make any sense at all to assert "There is no single word other than google that conveys the action of searching the Internet using any search engine" without intrinsically crediting the entity Google with the credit for it meaning that.
It seems like a pretty arbitrary taking to simply de-list their owned trademark by government fiat, PARTICULARLY when it's not like they're abusing it.
-Styopa
We used to love Dan Pirisi here on slashdot. The guy made a habit out of registering things he didn't like with "Sucks" at the end of it.
http://www.salon.com/2001/06/2...
His case was hard fought and he won with the defense of registering a domain name with "sucks" in it is a criticism of the companies being featured. Good story from the early days of slashdot/the internet.
Do they still have their Trademark?
Because that's pretty much synonymous with every snotrag now.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
So should Coca-cola Company lose their trademark because a bunch of Georgians erroneously call all soft drinks "coke" ?
Sure, sometimes trademarks become genericized. And sometimes the trademark is lost, and other times the courts decide that the trademarks are still valid. Usually the newer the trademark the less likely it is to be lost, probably because modern courts are corporation-friendly.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
They are after your life and everthing about you for use in Advertising 'stuff' you don't want directly to you.
They are Evil.
My 7-year-old son uses the term "search up", which he learned at school. "Dad, just search up the eclipse!" It actually seems like a decent term for, um, googling.
Good thing they changed their name to Alphabet. They'll never have any problems with that.
"Googling" is limited to your personal filter bubble whereas "searching" is ignorant to your web history.
Apple should be sued too because that word no longer describes the fruit it originally was inteneded to describe. It rather describes phones and tablets.
Same fate should go for IBM because it stands for International Business Machines, but the company sells pretty much every "machine" they make to the Chinese... NEXT!!!!
Supreme Court has been asked nothing... this is an appeal from a lost lawsuit to higher court. And it'll probably not be taken, let alone pass.
Either way, it's Google's win. If they win, they keep the trademark and the term doesn't become generic. If it becomes generic though, it only works as marketing material for them with the term being cemented as searching for content on the Internet.
Let me understand.
Then, if you work hard to make something successful, and because of that wonderful work your name becomes a synonym of the main task that work it is related, then you need to give up on your name?
Then it is wrong to have Hoover vacuum machines right?
As a web service, the trademark also enjoys near perfect inherent trademark in protection. Imagne it being otherwise: You go to Sears "to buy something on Amazon." It would be simple idiocy to think this.
If you go to google.com, you get either get Google or you are having a bad problem and you will not go to internet today.
Yes, they should. That's how it's supposed to work, exactly.
Neither this world nor its laws exist for the comfort and privilege of the Coca-Cola Company.
Coca-Cola is granted certain rights of naming under certain conditions in order to enhance trade among humans. That purpose is not served by treating their artificial, temporary right to a name as though it were some moral or natural law. They lose it when it becomes generic, like band-aid or kleenex.
But nowadays corporations have redefined copyright violation as theft and illicit copying as piracy, and people act like it's true.
Learn from the Sriracha Guy.
Google the new Frigidair?
I've heard similarly braindead humans refer to their Android smartphone as a iphone. It seems "iphone" has become the Kleenex of smartphones. I therefore move that we remove that trademark protection, too.
Might makes right irrelevant.
The Supreme Court hasn't granted cert, so the case might not even be heard. This is along the lines of "any idiot can file a lawsuit".
If the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case, then it will be interesting. In agreeing to hear the case, there is a presumption---no matter how slight---that they may overturn the appellate ruling.
Until the Supreme Court grants/denies cert, this is just background noise.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Ever wonder why they call it Alphabet? Because alphabet agencies (CIA/NSA/FBI/ETC.) created it with our blood, our treasure, our fucking resources. They created it to catalog and prey on us. We will use "Google" whenever the fuck we want. It is a public domain company and should be broken up and raided at will.
I'm going to use looked, not searched or google.
Websearch
Webservers are considered a word too as are webmasters, webrings, webcrawlers and so on so forth.
If one can trademark 'Best Buy', anything goes.
PlanetVulkan.com
Maybe too many people uncertain whether it should be pronounce "Sellotape" or "Kellotape"?
Seriously, why do we even have a redundant letter like "c" in the language? How about we clean things up and replace it with "s" or "k" as appropriate, with "c" only still appearing as the first half of the double letter "ch". Eventually, once everybody is accustomed to the change, we can then drop the redundant "h" and let "c" do that job on its own. Come to think of it, isn't it about time to lose the "u" after "q"?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
"Google" should not have trademark protection when it is used to refer to the NUMBER. Otherwise, when referring to an internet search, it absolutely is a trademark. And I say this as someone generally opposed to our corporate overlords. This argument is weak, and simply encouraging the further dilution of language.
Not that I've ever used the verb "Google" for any other search engine, but:
How many of you Hoover or Lux your floor with an actual Hoover or Electrolux vacuum cleaner?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Stuck on fucking stupid.
Either they will not miss it and rule that 'google' is generic.
Or they will miss it and rule for big G.
You forgot Xerox. Also Dumpster (really!).
I am getting pretty sick of this Trump hysteria....
This Gillespie guy is wasting money like crazy. The Court is likely to decline hearing his case, and that is to his benefit. He's just throwing good money after bad in a doomed quest to do the absurd.
Not that there aren't other reasons he should not be allowed to register domains with those names. For example, google-emailsecurity.com would be a great URL for a phishing campaign.
But outside the USA, generic brands have to use the term "acetylsalicylic acid" because Bayer owns the name ASPIRIN®.
We don't have Coke. Will Pepsi be OK?
You can't snort Pepsi.
When someone wants me to search google... they say google *whatever*.
When someone wants me to search youtube... they say youtube *whatever*.
Clearly it doesn't mean "search the entire internet".