Here's a fun thought experiment -- which current big tech company do you think will eventually, a hundred years from now, lose control of their trademark and have it genericized
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Replying to @arthur_affect
"Google" barely qualifies as a trademark even now. "Google-eyed" and Barney Google had been around since forever. It's not like Kleenex or Kodak or Thermos or Exxon. They didn't invent the word, and their 'ownership' of the trademark is paradoxically based on popular usage.
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Replying to @WaPoMax @arthur_affect
Plenty of common words are trademarks, e.g. 'Apple', 'Twitter', 'Ford', 'Person', 'What'; IANAL, but it's my understanding that the existence of 'google-eyed' (or a character named 'Google') doesn't really factor into whether Google is a trademark in a search engine context.
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Replying to @BingoBingoBango @WaPoMax
Yeah, trademark is about the use of a word in the specific context of advertising a company's goods and services, not whether the word has been used in the past at all I mean nowadays most tech companies obnoxiously misspell words just to make sure, but it isn't necessary
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Cf. the Apple vs. Apple legal dispute, where Apple Records and Apple Computer agreed they could both be called "Apple" as long as they stuck to their respective fields of music and computing and neither one tried to poach on the other
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And the only reason either of them was allowed to call themselves "Apple" in the first place is that neither of them was in the business of selling actual apples -- you can't take an already-generic common noun for the actual product and make that your trademark
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(Famously, Apple Records was arguably far too aggressive with their enforcement of this deal, suing Apple Computer every time they did anything even tangentially related to music, like making it possible for a Macintosh to play MIDI files But you know, fuck Steve Jobs)
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And as silly as it seems to those of us who don't remember Apple Records actually doing anything other than milking money off of trademark lawsuits since before we were born, creating iTunes was pretty obviously a blatant violation of the deal
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Like, they obviously weren't going to do it anymore at that point, but when they were a real operating music label creating something like the iTunes store is obviously something Apple Records *could* have done as part of their business, and now it was impossible to do so
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So I'm wholly in favor of Steve Jobs having to cough up whatever ridiculous nine-digit amount of money it was to pay them off to stop the lawsuits once and for all
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