From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.2 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 109fba,df854b5838c3e14 X-Google-Attributes: gid109fba,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,df854b5838c3e14 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 10db24,fec75f150a0d78f5 X-Google-Attributes: gid10db24,public X-Google-Thread: 1014db,df854b5838c3e14 X-Google-Attributes: gid1014db,public From: ncohen@watson.ibm.com (Norman H. Cohen) Subject: Trademarks (was: Re: ANSI C and POSIX) Date: 1996/04/10 Message-ID: <4kgj45$q8t@watnews1.watson.ibm.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 146746867 distribution: world references: <828903918snz@genesis.demon.co.uk> <4kb1l1$ajm@solutions.solon.com> organization: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center reply-to: ncohen@watson.ibm.com newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.edu Date: 1996-04-10T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article , danpop@mail.cern.ch (Dan Pop) writes: |> In dewar@cs.nyu.edu (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 ncohen@watson.ibm.com