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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,
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.
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.
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
Good thing they changed their name to Alphabet. They'll never have any problems with that.
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.
If one can trademark 'Best Buy', anything goes.
PlanetVulkan.com
A plan for the improvement of spelling in the English language
By Mark Twain
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Generally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeiniing voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x"— bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez —tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivili.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.