Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Supreme Court Asked To Nullify the Google Trademark (arstechnica.com)

Posted by msmash on from the setting-precedent dept.

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."

9 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. Re:bullshit by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 5, Funny

    Bing
    Is
    Not
    Google

    --
    Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
  2. Re:bullshit by UnknowingFool · · Score: 2, Funny

    What is this "Bing" that you speak of? I'm pretty sure no one on the Interwebs has ever heard of it. :P

    --
    Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
  3. Re:bullshit by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Funny

    I've heard "Just google it on bing. Works a lot better."

    I doubt it. I have never heard anyone say that Bing "works a lot better".

  4. Re:bullshit by EvilSS · · Score: 5, Funny

    Bayer also lost the trademark to "Heroin".

    Well that turned out to be short sighted. The war on heroin would be over today if Bayer could go after street dealers for trademark infringement!

    --
    I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
  5. Re:Google means search with google by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 4, Funny
    But these companies have an army of lawyers who would send cease and desist letters to newspapers and other organizations when they use brandnames generically. Xerox used to be very aggressive about it.

    I wonder if there is a way for Google to find people using the word "google" in a generic sense. Some kind of ability to look at millions of use cases and citations, some kind of artificial intelligence to infer the context... Wondering who Google would turn to find information.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  6. I prefer to use... by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 4, Funny

    The privacy-preserving search engine, DuckDuckGoogle.

    --
    #DeleteChrome
  7. Re: bullshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    I prefer to AskJeeves it on AltaVista

  8. Alphabet by dottrap · · Score: 4, Funny

    Good thing they changed their name to Alphabet. They'll never have any problems with that.

  9. Re: bullshit by SQLGuru · · Score: 3, Funny

    DogPile on Lycos. (still sort of works linguistically)