NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/lang/c++-part2/16362

Internet Message Format | 1996-08-05 | 1.9 KB

Path: watnews.watson.ibm.com!ncohen
From: [e-mail] (Norman H. Cohen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.edu
Subject: Trademarks (was: Re: ANSI C and POSIX)
Date: 10 Apr 1996 15:12:05 GMT
Organization: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <4kgj45$[e-mail]>
References: <[e-mail]> <dewar.828879781@schonberg> <[e-mail]> <dewar.828912460@schonberg> <4kb1l1$[e-mail]> <dewar.828987795@schonberg> <danpop.829080300@rscernix>
Reply-To: [e-mail]
NNTP-Posting-Host: rios8.watson.ibm.com

In article <danpop.829080300@rscernix>, [e-mail] (Dan Pop) writes:
|> In <dewar.828987795@schonberg> [e-mail] (Robert Dewar) writes:
|>
|> >Peter Seebach's claims about trademarks are most peculiar, certainly not
|> >even vaguely correct in the US (where you could never manage to trademark
|> >Wednesday -- in fact the trademark of Ada was in all likelihood never valid!)
|>
|> If someone managed to trademark Apple, I see no reason why one couldn't
|> trademark Wednesday in the US.

Indeed one can trademark a common word.  However, this only provides
protection against uses of the word in contexts where confusion with the
products named by the trademark might result.  Thus supermarkets do not
violate Apple Computer's trademark when they label their wares as
"apples" or "MacIntoshes".  That is also why McDonalds and Apple can
both trademark "Mac" (along with the British rainwear manufacturer that
sued the Beatles for the "Penny Lane" lyric, "The banker never wears a
Mac in the pouring rain," in an effort to protect their trademark from
becoming a generic term).

Concerning the probable invalidity of the Ada trademark, I understood
that that was because of the inapplicability of trademarks to
programming-language definitions.

--
Norman H. Cohen    [e-mail]