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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.
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.
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,
And they don't say, "Let me google that. Hey Siri, "When is the eclipse?" "
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
No?
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 that 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.
You obviously haven't been around non-tech people in a while.
I've heard "google that on Bing" "I use yahoo to google."; for a non-trivial number of people, "to google" justt means "to search online".
Just like "hand me a kleenex" "i need a band-aid". The terms are still trademarked, but the public chooses to use it generically for anything similiar.
Because their name is Google, not googol, as in 1.0 × 10^100
Jeeves just told me this is BS.
Because google is not googol
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.
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
The privacy-preserving search engine, DuckDuckGoogle.
#DeleteChrome
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
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.
The eclipse is in 2024.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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!!!!
Oops. Sorry for the latency. The Internet is kind of slow here.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
Google the new Frigidair?
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.
It's spelled, "Frisbee", and yes, it's a registered trademark of the Wham-O Toy Company. If a competitor advertised their own flying disc as a "frisbee", Wham-O would undoubtedly take legal action. Wham-O also owns the trademark for Hula Hoop.
One of the things companies do to prevent the loss of trademarks through genericization is to place messages in trade magazines targeted toward journalists, reminding them to include the trademark symbol when writing about trademarked items. That's enough to prevent loss of the mark.
When they say they are going to google something, they mean they are going to use google to search the internet.
Except when they don't.
I have seen people say they were googling something when they were using Bing or Siri.
I'm pretty sure there isn't a lmgtfy that....Never mind.
http://lmgtfy.com/?s=b&q=let+m...
You can set lmgtfy to use search engines other than google.
That's disturbing.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
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.
I just looked for lmbtfy.com for "let me bing that for you." The site exists, but it searches Google by default! So apparently, you can Bing something using Google. So Bing should lose their trademark too.
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.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
I'm going to use looked, not searched or google.
It is a public domain company and should be broken up and raided at will.
Whats its like, being a complete crackpot?
If one can trademark 'Best Buy', anything goes.
PlanetVulkan.com
REGISTRANT CONTACT
Organization:Google Inc.
ADMINISTRATIVE CONTACT
Organization:Google Inc.
TECHNICAL CONTACT
Organization:Google Inc.
I'm pretty sure your link confirms that their name is Google, and not Googol
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
Bing using google? What madness!
Actually letmegooglethatforyou.com, lmgtfy.com and lmbtfy.com are all run by the same entity (notice the logo) surprisingly letmebingthatforyou.com is not.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
While you can change it, Siri uses Google by default.
Finding idiots doesn't make a trademark invalid.
It does if you find enough of them. Common usage doesn't mean usage by domain experts.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
They have to. At least over here it's not general, widespread generic use that can make you loose your brand, but you have to proof that you took appropriate action to defend your brand.
I wonder if there is a way for Google to find people using the word "google" in a generic sense.
At least they tried.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
https://www.heise.de/newsticke...
http://www.literaturcafe.de/go...
And if you want, you may look up the official definition of "to google"
https://www.merriam-webster.co...
bickerdyke
It's spelled, "Frisbee", and yes, it's a registered trademark of the Wham-O Toy Company. If a competitor advertised their own flying disc as a "frisbee", Wham-O would undoubtedly take legal action. Wham-O also owns the trademark for Hula Hoop.
Interesting, as both could be depicted in a simplified way by a plain circle.
So they are the actual "Hudsucker Industries"!
bickerdyke
You forgot Xerox. Also Dumpster (really!).
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.
Interesting, as both could be depicted in a simplified way by a plain circle.
The Hula Hoop, sure. But the Frisbee is not a "plain circle"; in cross-section it's an airfoil, and it generates lift when traveling horizontally. Very clever in its simplicity.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...
How would the drawing in this movie have been any different if it was about a Frisbee?
bickerdyke
Wondering who Google would turn to find information.
That's sort of like asking "where do Hawai'ians go for vacation? (BTW: it's Las Vegas, aka "the 9th island.")
weylin
67.5% Slashdot Pure I guess I need to work on that....
Just so you know.. based on the Xerox ruling I agree with you.
But I havn't met one of those idiots yet. And the company has aggressively defended it's trademark.
And the guy trying to violate their trademark seems scummy to me.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.