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AOL Trademarks nixed
Robert Wilde writes "A small dose of sanity in the world of trademarks, according to a ZDNN story; the courts have ruled AOL doesn't own "You've got mail," "IM," or "buddy list." " So, I suppose that means my copyright for "E-Commerce Solution" and "E-mail" is probably out as well.
the term "trademark" is public domain and may not be trademarked. however you can copyright the the phrase "trademark(tm)." ;).
So is AOL's trademark application for the word "wardialer" still pending? Has anybody figured out why in the world AOL considers themselves to have a valid claim over the word (or why they'd want to)?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Hmm, I hope "first post" is TM-able. That way Rob can trademark it and sue all the ACs who use it without his permission!
While I applaud the way they handled that situation, Apple are
hardly people who should complain about bogus IP claims.
These are the people who sued MS for using an approach to HCI
that apple had copied from Xerox . They are probably the
worst offenders in terms of dubious IP claims of any high tech
company, and that's against some some pretty tough competition".
Trademarking plain language makes no sense to me. If you want a
trademark, invent a word.
Although, maybe MS should be entitled to
"Where are we going to take you today"
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Thanks! I'd wondered about this, but I've always seen it attributed to Goldwater without mentioning Jefferson.
... extremism is used as a dirty word, but it oughtn't be other than a morally neutral modifier rendered good or bad by context.
:)
Point is still the same though
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
As for IM - I prefer ICQ :) much more useful and nice and convinient
AOL is being silly about "You have mail." On the other hand, "Instant Messenger" seems like a reasonable thing to be able to trademark for a product name. On the other hand, if I create "Immediate Mail" and refer to as "IM", AOL shouldn't be able to do anything. This reminds me of, way back when, IBM trying to stop people who were making Micro-Channel Cards from using "/2" in the name (the only machines with MCA were IBM's PS/2) by trademarking or copyrighting "/2". Which brought up the whole bit about everybody having to pay IBM for the right to divide by 2.
My thoughts exactly! Moderate this one up! :)
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try."
No - I am not trolling, the topic of trademarking these banal phrases just got me to wondering if FileMaker Pro actually trademarked that particular phrase ... they are definitely using it a lot in advertising, etc.
...
Everytime I go to their website, I can't help but giggle at such a friendly slogan
;-)
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
The first I read of "instant Messages" was in Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia novel, a combination of two stories published in the early 1950's.
...got milk?
:) -- Smiley not trademarked
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
so does that mean i cant say to my flatmate, youve got mail?, as in snail mail, that ive been using for the past 20 f*cking years? Im sure there are people out there who have been using it for a hell of a lot longer then AOL. Its not a term they coined, its been around since time began, AOL dont and shouldnt own it.
Cyrix codenamed one of their processors Jedi and Lucas got really pissed off at that so Cyrix changed it to some desert name. Its a damn codename, its not like the finally product would be called that.
"You have mail." dates back to (possibly before) just about any UNIX out there. "You've got mail." is an aolism, however. I still don't think it should be trademarkable(it's a word now).
-matt
Uhm...correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't aol trying to trademark "You've got mail" not "You have mail" AT&T has been using "You have mail" since the times when it wrote UNIX.
-matt
I swear that upon the start of a company I will avoid the use of patents and trademarks and copyright saving them as al last resort as they constitute munitions in corporate war.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
You only have to aggresively defend patents. You can let trademarks go w/ no fear of losing the trademark. Look at "linux" for an example. Linus afaik does NOTHING to defend the trademark, yet it's still his.
-matt
Muhahahaha!!!! AOL can't touch me!
Does anyone remember the name of the floppy controller from the original apples? Wasn't it something like the "Wozniac [something] Device"?
-matt
yet another term that comes from the days of AT&T MCI and Sprint, CC abuse :)
Apropos of nothing, Mitsubishi actually did manufacture a Plymouth for a time, the Dodge/Plymouth Colt, which I was privileged to drive for two years. IIRC, Mitsubishi still makes the Eagle Talon (except they don't make Eagles anymore) or whatever they call it when it's a Dodge.
Does this mean that apple can't really hold a trademark on the word "Trash" and its icon?
I believe both the KDE project and Corel Linux were asked not to use it, and are now considering using Dumpster instead...
Seems to me that if "You've got mail" doesn't hold up, then Trash is a really silly trademark!
Is it just me, or have people from the UK only
recently started referring to corporations as
plural entities? Suddenly I'm surrounded by
phrases such as "Apple are as bad as everyone"
Has it always been this way, and I'm just in the
dark? The Economist using the "American"
usage of a corporation as a single entity, so I
don't know what to think.
Not a grammar rant, just a query.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't see why people make fun of this one so much. It actually makes sense! If your keyboard isn't working, there's not terribly much you can do. Connect a valid keyboard and you're able to press F1 and continue the boot.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
I don't know how much more common of a trademarked word or phrase you can get than ...
"Windows"
:)
Awesome!
ok, so the road is free for an AOL internet explorer ? i don't think so.
Yep. It's all over the papers here...
Also 'Site Promotion' is trademarked.
sometimes i swear that the courts are the only ones that make any sane decisions in this country anymore...
i guess we can only hope that the justice system doesnt get screwed with extremist appointees... i think that there are going to be a large amount of privacy and free speech debates. we definately need some strict constitutionalists in there...
oh yeh - do you think that my trademark attempt on "first post" will hold up?
... hi bingo
Today it was also discovered that, contrary to popular belief, Microsoft Corp. does not own the trademarks to "General Protection Fault", "Fatal Exception Error" or "Please restart your computer".
Wah!
Here
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
I'm glad to see the courts are throwing out silly copyrights.. Now if they'll only start throwing out the silly patents everywhere..
So does this mean I can legally say "xerox" now instead of "photocopy" and "kleenex" instead of "facial tissue"? "Magic markers" instead of the generic "permanent markers"? Can I sell some Band-aids now?
So now I suppose I can start up a content providing business and call it "NAOL" (North America Online" or "WOL" (World Online) and add in a nifty little program called NIM or WIM which has a "buddy list"? And when people get email, a nice happy voice of a guy from Orville can tell you "You've got mail!" Think of the possibilities...
You forgot "Abort, Retry, Fail?"
Do not read this
Now I don't have to add: "the phrase 'You've got Mail' is a registered trademark of America Online, Inc." That kinda annoyed the family.
What about the people who don't know how to use proper punctuation? The ones who say "Im going to the mall." Do they have to pay AOL for the use of the term "IM"?
/SARCASM
Although this brings up an interesting point....Did AOL own that patent at any time BEFORE this ruling? There was that movie "You've got Mail" with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Did they have to pay AOL royalties for that title? Aren't they entitled to get those royalties back?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Oh well, I'll just have to patent the use of wood or stone, organised in a cuboid structure, with a hollow interior. I'm thinking of calling it a "building".
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There is a big distinction between copyright and trademark. Please, let's have some accuracy in reporting. :)
Probably not. Those images were the work of a graphic artist somewhere, so AOL does have the copyright to them. They are well within their rights to have GAIM remove them.
This ruling just means that AOL doesn't own the words "You've Got Mail", etc... They still own the rights to most of the rest of the stuff (as they should, since they developed it).
-ElJefe
Oh, "You've got mail" was a huge marketing campaign for AOL... rather ingenious, I think, actually. Think of all the non-computer people who would watch that, see that the Internet is not just for geeks, or think that they'll meet Mr/Ms Right on AOL, and go sign up. The amount that AOL made from that sort of advertising/publicity is worth any amount of "royalties" they could ever try to get from usage of the phrase. In fact, I think that they probably paid a lot of cash to help fund the movie.
...AIM clone developers will be able to use the IM buddy graphic in their clients again? (thinking of gaim)
My favorite trademark infringement story ever:
Apple had a habit of naming it's internal secret projects after various things. One project was dubbed internally as "Sagan", with respect to, of course, the sci-fi writer Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan learned of this and threatened to sue Apple for the unauthorized use of his name. Apple quickly complied, chaning the name of the project to "Stuck-up astronomer." Or so the story goes.
Heehee.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Well, Instant Messenger as a tradmark isn't really ridiculous. For AT&T to come out with a similar product and give it an identical name is really shady. What if Mitsubishi came out with a car called the "Plymouth" and argued that, hey, Plymouth is a popular name. Bullsh*@#$%&t. We don't complain about IBM which has a TM on "International Business Machines", and I don't see how you can get much more generic than that.
It's just fashionable to bust on MS and AOL these days.
--JRZ
Truthfully, I think that the framers of the constitution should have stopped at
... they werent about making oppression, they were about freeing themselves...
"Congress shall make no law" and been finished there.
I have a serious problem with people trying to interpret the consitution with the attitude of
---
the founders of this country never really MEANT to arm the peopple and to make sure that the right to free speech be respected, they would have never put them in today
---
the framers of the consitutution REVOLTED
oh well...
and dont start me on states rights and what the fedearl govt has been doing with that.
... hi bingo
I'm glad to see you're taking a stand against the patent holders of the caps lock key.
Does that mean that my submissions for trademarks for "." and "com" and "net" and "org" might not go through? Dang it!
aol sucks.
People, their what's for dinner.
Not that i support AOL, but I don't see why they shouldn't at least be able to protect the annoying sound bite for "You've got mail." As for protecting the actual verbage of "you've got mail, IM and buddy list" that is IMHO just another attempt at AOL's lawyers to get more billable hours and tie up the courts from doing anything productive. As for the whole IM hoopla, i thought that there had been sucessful cases for "Look and Feel" infringement befor (ala Microsoft and Apple).
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
In the movie 'Eraser', (w/ Arnold Schwarzenegger), I believe, there was an Evil Company named Cyrex. After Cyrix complained, the name changed to something else.
Photos of bits of the past hiding in the present: afiler.com
Hey all,
I'm sorry to inform you that I have now copyrighted the word "Internet" (c) in all shapes and forms.
Hereby each use of the word in question will be charged a standard rate of £5.
"Internet" and all its derivatives (c) The Jazzmann 1999.
Sun has, well, "Sun" and "Java". (What if Starbucks wants to use the word "Java" in a product)
Apple has "Macintosh" which conflicts with the (to be eaten) apple.
FASA Corp has "Matrix".
"Joy" dish soap; "Cheer" ditergent; "Tide" (with bleach;
Realy, I think a country's body of laws should be the absolute minimal requred to keep order -- that shouldn't include *any* copyright, patent, or trademark laws...
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I'm surprised no one else posted this yet.
Scroll down a bit. It's the second "News in Brief" article.
-ElJefe
"Joy" dish soap; "Cheer" ditergent; "Tide" (with bleach)
;)
I couldn't tell any sarcasm from your comment, so here I go
Joy is also an emotion, therefore when referenced to as such no trademark or copyright can be applied.
The same applies for the rest.
However re. Java, I'm no lawyer, but if they were to refer to it in a sensible way I'm sure Sun would have no problems with it. For example "Java coffee, the new blend from xxx" is unlikely to be a problem. However other obvious trade-ins on the name should be taken up
I don't know about all the others, but surely Banyan Systems already have the IM mark for their Intelligent Messaging system...?
J
If MS are using that as a trademark now they really are hypocrites.
--
My fave: TWAIN - Technology Without an Interesting Name .. a communication protocal for data aquisition across SCSI, I think?
"Old man yells at systemd"
I suspect (not having seen it, I can't confirm) that the title was actually in the end an example of product placement. In other words, AOL paid THE MOVIE PRODUCERS for them to use the title, instead of the other way around.
For a while in pre-production the film had a couple of different titles (such as You Have Mail), only changing to You've Got Mail in April '98 -- so it's likely that they initially avoided [read:played coy] any association, until AOL ponied up in some way (which could have been as simple as running "co-op ads").
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Use Windows enough and you'd think they did.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
...now let's see them get rid of "Let's go!", "Where do you want to go today?", "Just do it!", and all other English phrases in common daily use.
Marketing slogans shouldn't be trademarked. If the company wants that protection, they should use one of their trademark product names in their slogan.
>WHY on earth would we want those? Hell, let MS patent 'em.
You mean they haven't already?!?
For those interested...
http://www.wolfstonelaw.com/saganslande r.html
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
hell,
language is there to communicate with. so if many ppl use a word no moneysucker should be allowed to stop them from doing that. it is just that some ppl are too stupid to listen to the words others develop. so here comes somebody and says "hey i made this silly combination of letters up - it belongs to me". it is so strange a few letters than can even be pronounced and they think they can owe that. ha ha ha
You only have to aggresively defend patents. You can let trademarks go w/ no fear of losing the trademark. Look at "linux" for an example. Linus afaik does NOTHING to defend the trademark, yet it's still his.
... all trademarks that were not protected, and lost.
Why don't you give that bit of sage advice to the originators of heroin, zipper, aspirin, escalator, granola, yo-yo and linoleum
It's the responsibility of the trademark owner to research the mark's distinctiveness in the beginning, to police the market for competitors' use of possibly infringing marks, and to object before an "unreasonable" time has passed -- otherwise there aren't legal grounds to claim infringement.
As for Linus -- he's actually vigorously and quickly defended the Linux trademark. Note that allowing others to use the trademark doesn't infringe, if they are doing so as agents of the owner. Variant Linux distributions fall under that rubric. Granted, this is a special -- perhaps very nearly unique -- case, but in principle it's not very different from, say, a restaurant franchising operation.
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Hear, hear! Actually, I'm in favor of some laws occasionally, but every law should not only be necessary but should be periodically reviewed (or reviewable on demand).
But I think every law can be analyzed in terms of how much freedom it either safeguards or removes -- and that this is the most important benchmark. Not "how many lives can be saved," "making an important moral statement," "protecting members of Interest Group X," etc.
Today's politicians are (with few exceptions) late-Roman empire types, dispensing favors in order to keep their purple togas -- not the revolutionaries who broke from Brittain and said "No taxation without representation." Instead, it's "Taxation is OK, so long as my district gets a portion of gravy, and my friend here gets the contract for ladling it out."
just thoughts (with the conclusion that voting l/Libertarian is the least evil thing to do
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Barry was quoting Thomas Jefferson.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Instant messenger is really the function of the program, not a specific name. ICQ is considered "instant messenging software" as well. I guess you could consider it a new genre of Internet software. It's like saying AOL E-mailer. You wouldn't be able to trademark the E-mailer because it's a function.
And who can forget the PS/2's "Generally Operational Linear Digital Biphase Electronic Retardance Gate" -- GOLDBERG for short -- that silly rod that went from the Big Red Switch all the way back to the power supply...
Serves them right for not coming up with something even more banal: like "I Seek You."
AOL's likely response can probably be summed up in the family words of the other patently annoying, yet infuriatingly ubiquitous desktop client.
Ut oh!
--
Rob Carlson
--bdj