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I'm surprised that "JavaScript" has not become a generic trademark [0]. Examples from the Wikipedia article include Thermos, Chapstick, and Dumpster. [0]: http

by Wehrdo 8y ago

I'm surprised that "JavaScript" has not become a generic trademark [0]. Examples from the Wikipedia article include Thermos, Chapstick, and Dumpster. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark

petercooper 8y ago
I was at a keynote about 6 years ago where Brendan Eich said he thought it'd be indefensible as a trademark now too, though I must note it was just his opinion. That Oracle are now suddenly attempting to defend the trademark must mean something..
- cryptonector 8y ago
  It may mean nothing more than that some Oracle lawyer is keeping busy, showing that they are pulling their weight.
cryptonector 8y ago
A test case might be needed. If Oracle were to sue a deep-pocketed competitor over the trademark, then we might find a court reaching the conclusion that the trademark has been diluted and the name is now generic. But if Oracle does no such thing, and sues only shallow-pocketed "nobodies", then the legal status of the mark will remain unclear. My guess is Oracle would only do the latter, and that they're doing it because some lawyer thinks that Oracle has to do this to demonstrate that it is defending the mark even though that's nonsense if they don't go after notable unlicensed uses of their mark. Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to a corporate lawyer.
- cobbzilla 8y ago
  I love your riff on Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to a corporate lawyer." Shall we call it Cryptonector's Razor? You invented it, you name it :) edit: someone else (not me) should name the principle that explains why so few people on HN have any sense of humor whatsoever.
  - cryptonector 8y ago
    Hmmm, I don't think I've heard anyone else express this razor, so, yeah, sure, you can call it after me, though it does seem vain of me to say that you should, so let's let you call it whatever you want. As to the HN-has-little-humor phenomenon, well, some people seem to think that dry == authoritative. That's BS, of course, but I don't know what to call that. I'll think about it.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > edit: someone else (not me) should name the principle that explains why so few people on HN have any sense of humor whatsoever. I think lots of people have sense of humor, but it's accepted here in very limited amount (and preferably when it's clever humor). I'd attribute this to HN being one of the few remaining places on the Internet where you can discuss serious/interesting stuff without immediately drowning in effort-free jokes and memes - and people want to keep it that way. Hence, the word I'd be looking for might be "oversensitivity".
    - cobbzilla 8y ago
      I agree with everything you said, but c'mon, down-voting nerd-humor is just wrong. If you don't "get" the joke, just move on; only down-vote if the humor is inappropriate. In this case, I thought my nerd-humor was welcome, and in the worst case, someone who didn't know about Hanlon's Razor would be educated and maybe have a laugh. It's not like this was toilet humor. Have a heart, HN :)
- coldacid 8y ago
  >Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to a corporate lawyer. Are corporate lawyers not the physical manifestation of malice itself?
  - cryptonector 8y ago
    Not always. It's just difficult for them to do the right thing when it's so easy to pretend you have the law on your side that that makes it OK to take the 800 lb gorilla you work for and then go sit it on some nobody. And too many executives can't bring themselves to tell the lawyers to worry about legal things and let the executives make the business decisions. I've seen this time and again. Inexperienced or just lame executives often let the lawyers force their decisions.
  - arkades 8y ago
    There are no lawyers in this thread, huh? My wife is a corporate lawyer, so ive seen a little bit of these shenanigans from her perspective. And it pretty much boils down to this: there are certain risks lawyers can take and keep their jobs, and risks they will lose their jobs over. Like everyone else, they do not enjoy unemployment. Saying “this business idea is fine, go for it” and it succeeds? They get no credit. Saying “I don’t think this is legal,” ugh, lawyers are always too cautious, but its par for the course sonit doesn’t reflect badly on them. Saying “go for it” and get nailed in an enforcement action? Unemployed and unemployable. Likewise, when it comes to protecting IP, as required by law. They can’t -not- do it: it’s their job, explicitly, to protect the IP. Deciding “we will not pursue the correct course of legal action to (legally) protect our clients rights to protect their branding” isn’t in their purview, that belongs to the execs (who Are the ones that make those decisions). Any lawyer that decided that on their own? They’d better hope it -never- has -any- consequences, because... unemployed and unemployable. It’s easy to blame lawyers for protecting their clients rights, but all they do is navigate the system. They don’t make the system[1], and they don’t pull the trigger [1] there is a meme that lawyers build the legal system, as opposed to, you know, legislators, lobbyists, special interest groups, etc. I find it poorly related to reality.
    - CamTin 8y ago
- tscs37 8y ago
  This is Oracle. "Never attribute to malice [...]" doesn't apply to Oracle.
  - cryptonector 8y ago
    "Never attribute to corporate lawyers what you can attribute to Oracle"? Good point.
marshray 8y ago
A lot of what's said and written about genericized trademarks is just utter BS. Go ahead and market a product named Thermos, Chapstick, Band-Aid, or Kleenex in the US and see how far you get.
- swsieber 8y ago
  That's not the issue here. Try selling a product called "Kleenex Dispenser" or "Man's Guide to Kleenex" and see how far you get. That's a more analogous example.
  - comex 8y ago
    That is more analogous to the current situation, but it’s also irrelevant to the issue of trademark genericization, which the parent of your comment was replying to someone else’s claim about.
  - rootlocus 8y ago
    > I'm surprised that "JavaScript" has not become a generic trademark If Kleenex = Java and Kleenex Dispenser = javascript, your argument is wrong.
    - johndough 8y ago
      I think the argument is Kleenex = javascript and "Kleenex Dispenser" = "HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, HTML, Snippet Editor": https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/8d0bg2/oracle_owns_javascript_so_apple_is_taking_down_my/dxjz82f/ https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/8d0bg2/oracle_o...
    - Brian_K_White 8y ago
      His argument is valid. You are correcting something he never said. Kleenex = JavaScript Kranky Kim's Kleenex Keeper = Blue Mountain JavaScript Percolator Kleenex is probably a bad example, because Kleenex has actually defended their trademark. At least I don't think Kranky Kim could actually use Kleenex in her product name. I think the legal argument for the genericized meaning of "javascript" is valid and could be argued, in that you ciuld show that it's reasonable for anyone to think it was merely a noun and not a trademark. But the argument would take more years and money than any individual developer has. Which begs the question: Is there any such thing as a class action but for defense instead of lawsuit? Oracle could snuff out a million app developers individually without ever even having to so much as appear once in court. Just send these letters. But could a million developers act as a class in a defense the way they could in an action?
sin7 8y ago
This must be the reason that you can't say Legos online without being corrected.
- Someone1234 8y ago
  I don't follow. LEGO is the singular and the plural form. Thus "a LEGO brick" and "the LEGO bricks" are valid sentences. That's why some choose to correct Americas on their use of "legos." It has nothing to do with trademark law.
- leohutson 8y ago
  I think its just grating for grammar nazis, rather than a legal issue. It's like saying sheeps.
  - CannisterFlux 8y ago
    That should be "it's just grating" ;-) It's not quite the same as sheep/sheeps. Saying "there are 2 sheep in the field" is fine but saying "there are 2 Lego on the floor" still sounds a bit weird. You would have to use "there are 2 Lego bricks on the floor". It's because Lego is an uncountable noun, like rice or sand. E.g. "there are 2 grains of rice on the floor" is fine but "there are 2 rice on the floor" is not. Saying "there are 2 rices on the floor" sounds very bad, and is the equivalent to using "Legos" instead of "Lego bricks".
- ascorbic 8y ago
  Mainly I think it just sounds really grating to anyone outside America, as it's not used elsewhere. Similar to "I could care less".
  - icebraining 8y ago
    I'm outside America, and I hear it all the time.
    - ascorbic 8y ago
bobbyi_settv 8y ago
Most likely, that is exactly why they are pursuing actions like this one. They're worried that if they don't, they'll lose control over the name, not that this app itself is costing them anything.
- vertis 8y ago
  They don't really have any control over the name though. Agressive action to control it would just further alienate a community and cause a push back that would be damaging to Oracle...oh if only there were a push back.
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    A bunch of web devs would get pissed off and... stop buying Oracle products? For that to work, wouldn't they have to be buying any Oracle product at all in the first place?
donkeyd 8y ago
I wasn't even aware that Oracle owned the trademark. With Java, you can't really get around them, since you need to download JDK, but JavaScript just works. Maybe we can crowd fund a lawsuit!
mproud 8y ago
I doubt it. Where this has happened is where people get confused and call other things by the name. Adobe is worried about protecting Photoshop as people use the word as a verb for editing photos in other apps. Kimberly-Clark is worried about protecting Kleenex as people use the word as substitute for other tissues (at least in the U.S.) And Velcro is worried about protecting their namesake (it’s a hook and loop). People don’t typically confuse other scripting languages or web technologies for JavaScript. The reason Oracle cares here is not to protect the JavaScript brand. Instead, it’s to protect the Java brand, which people do confuse with other languages (or at least with JavaScript).

by Wehrdo 8y ago

petercooper 8y ago

I was at a keynote about 6 years ago where Brendan Eich said he thought it'd be indefensible as a trademark now too, though I must note it was just his opinion. That Oracle are now suddenly attempting to defend the trademark must mean something..

cryptonector 8y ago
It may mean nothing more than that some Oracle lawyer is keeping busy, showing that they are pulling their weight.

cryptonector 8y ago

A test case might be needed. If Oracle were to sue a deep-pocketed competitor over the trademark, then we might find a court reaching the conclusion that the trademark has been diluted and the name is now generic. But if Oracle does no such thing, and sues only shallow-pocketed "nobodies", then the legal status of the mark will remain unclear. My guess is Oracle would only do the latter, and that they're doing it because some lawyer thinks that Oracle has to do this to demonstrate that it is defending the mark even though that's nonsense if they don't go after notable unlicensed uses of their mark. Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to a corporate lawyer.

cobbzilla 8y ago
I love your riff on Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to a corporate lawyer." Shall we call it Cryptonector's Razor? You invented it, you name it :) edit: someone else (not me) should name the principle that explains why so few people on HN have any sense of humor whatsoever.
- cryptonector 8y ago
  Hmmm, I don't think I've heard anyone else express this razor, so, yeah, sure, you can call it after me, though it does seem vain of me to say that you should, so let's let you call it whatever you want. As to the HN-has-little-humor phenomenon, well, some people seem to think that dry == authoritative. That's BS, of course, but I don't know what to call that. I'll think about it.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > edit: someone else (not me) should name the principle that explains why so few people on HN have any sense of humor whatsoever. I think lots of people have sense of humor, but it's accepted here in very limited amount (and preferably when it's clever humor). I'd attribute this to HN being one of the few remaining places on the Internet where you can discuss serious/interesting stuff without immediately drowning in effort-free jokes and memes - and people want to keep it that way. Hence, the word I'd be looking for might be "oversensitivity".
  - cobbzilla 8y ago
    I agree with everything you said, but c'mon, down-voting nerd-humor is just wrong. If you don't "get" the joke, just move on; only down-vote if the humor is inappropriate. In this case, I thought my nerd-humor was welcome, and in the worst case, someone who didn't know about Hanlon's Razor would be educated and maybe have a laugh. It's not like this was toilet humor. Have a heart, HN :)
coldacid 8y ago
>Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to a corporate lawyer. Are corporate lawyers not the physical manifestation of malice itself?
- cryptonector 8y ago
  Not always. It's just difficult for them to do the right thing when it's so easy to pretend you have the law on your side that that makes it OK to take the 800 lb gorilla you work for and then go sit it on some nobody. And too many executives can't bring themselves to tell the lawyers to worry about legal things and let the executives make the business decisions. I've seen this time and again. Inexperienced or just lame executives often let the lawyers force their decisions.
- arkades 8y ago
  There are no lawyers in this thread, huh? My wife is a corporate lawyer, so ive seen a little bit of these shenanigans from her perspective. And it pretty much boils down to this: there are certain risks lawyers can take and keep their jobs, and risks they will lose their jobs over. Like everyone else, they do not enjoy unemployment. Saying “this business idea is fine, go for it” and it succeeds? They get no credit. Saying “I don’t think this is legal,” ugh, lawyers are always too cautious, but its par for the course sonit doesn’t reflect badly on them. Saying “go for it” and get nailed in an enforcement action? Unemployed and unemployable. Likewise, when it comes to protecting IP, as required by law. They can’t -not- do it: it’s their job, explicitly, to protect the IP. Deciding “we will not pursue the correct course of legal action to (legally) protect our clients rights to protect their branding” isn’t in their purview, that belongs to the execs (who Are the ones that make those decisions). Any lawyer that decided that on their own? They’d better hope it -never- has -any- consequences, because... unemployed and unemployable. It’s easy to blame lawyers for protecting their clients rights, but all they do is navigate the system. They don’t make the system[1], and they don’t pull the trigger [1] there is a meme that lawyers build the legal system, as opposed to, you know, legislators, lobbyists, special interest groups, etc. I find it poorly related to reality.
  - CamTin 8y ago
tscs37 8y ago
This is Oracle. "Never attribute to malice [...]" doesn't apply to Oracle.
- cryptonector 8y ago
  "Never attribute to corporate lawyers what you can attribute to Oracle"? Good point.

marshray 8y ago

A lot of what's said and written about genericized trademarks is just utter BS. Go ahead and market a product named Thermos, Chapstick, Band-Aid, or Kleenex in the US and see how far you get.

swsieber 8y ago
That's not the issue here. Try selling a product called "Kleenex Dispenser" or "Man's Guide to Kleenex" and see how far you get. That's a more analogous example.
- comex 8y ago
  That is more analogous to the current situation, but it’s also irrelevant to the issue of trademark genericization, which the parent of your comment was replying to someone else’s claim about.
- rootlocus 8y ago
  > I'm surprised that "JavaScript" has not become a generic trademark If Kleenex = Java and Kleenex Dispenser = javascript, your argument is wrong.
  - johndough 8y ago
    I think the argument is Kleenex = javascript and "Kleenex Dispenser" = "HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, HTML, Snippet Editor": https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/8d0bg2/oracle_owns_javascript_so_apple_is_taking_down_my/dxjz82f/ https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/8d0bg2/oracle_o...
  - Brian_K_White 8y ago
    His argument is valid. You are correcting something he never said. Kleenex = JavaScript Kranky Kim's Kleenex Keeper = Blue Mountain JavaScript Percolator Kleenex is probably a bad example, because Kleenex has actually defended their trademark. At least I don't think Kranky Kim could actually use Kleenex in her product name. I think the legal argument for the genericized meaning of "javascript" is valid and could be argued, in that you ciuld show that it's reasonable for anyone to think it was merely a noun and not a trademark. But the argument would take more years and money than any individual developer has. Which begs the question: Is there any such thing as a class action but for defense instead of lawsuit? Oracle could snuff out a million app developers individually without ever even having to so much as appear once in court. Just send these letters. But could a million developers act as a class in a defense the way they could in an action?

sin7 8y ago

This must be the reason that you can't say Legos online without being corrected.

Someone1234 8y ago
I don't follow. LEGO is the singular and the plural form. Thus "a LEGO brick" and "the LEGO bricks" are valid sentences. That's why some choose to correct Americas on their use of "legos." It has nothing to do with trademark law.
leohutson 8y ago
I think its just grating for grammar nazis, rather than a legal issue. It's like saying sheeps.
- CannisterFlux 8y ago
  That should be "it's just grating" ;-) It's not quite the same as sheep/sheeps. Saying "there are 2 sheep in the field" is fine but saying "there are 2 Lego on the floor" still sounds a bit weird. You would have to use "there are 2 Lego bricks on the floor". It's because Lego is an uncountable noun, like rice or sand. E.g. "there are 2 grains of rice on the floor" is fine but "there are 2 rice on the floor" is not. Saying "there are 2 rices on the floor" sounds very bad, and is the equivalent to using "Legos" instead of "Lego bricks".
ascorbic 8y ago
Mainly I think it just sounds really grating to anyone outside America, as it's not used elsewhere. Similar to "I could care less".
- icebraining 8y ago
  I'm outside America, and I hear it all the time.
  - ascorbic 8y ago

bobbyi_settv 8y ago

Most likely, that is exactly why they are pursuing actions like this one. They're worried that if they don't, they'll lose control over the name, not that this app itself is costing them anything.

vertis 8y ago
They don't really have any control over the name though. Agressive action to control it would just further alienate a community and cause a push back that would be damaging to Oracle...oh if only there were a push back.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  A bunch of web devs would get pissed off and... stop buying Oracle products? For that to work, wouldn't they have to be buying any Oracle product at all in the first place?

donkeyd 8y ago

I wasn't even aware that Oracle owned the trademark. With Java, you can't really get around them, since you need to download JDK, but JavaScript just works. Maybe we can crowd fund a lawsuit!

mproud 8y ago

I doubt it. Where this has happened is where people get confused and call other things by the name. Adobe is worried about protecting Photoshop as people use the word as a verb for editing photos in other apps. Kimberly-Clark is worried about protecting Kleenex as people use the word as substitute for other tissues (at least in the U.S.) And Velcro is worried about protecting their namesake (it’s a hook and loop). People don’t typically confuse other scripting languages or web technologies for JavaScript. The reason Oracle cares here is not to protect the JavaScript brand. Instead, it’s to protect the Java brand, which people do confuse with other languages (or at least with JavaScript).