2 ms·
There’s something particularly egregious about large corporations trying trademark widely used generic words or terms. Such behaviour is prohibited most place
by Lio 8y ago
There’s something particularly egregious about large corporations trying trademark widely used generic words or terms.
Such behaviour is prohibited most places. That these companies try intimidating people with spurious law suits makes it easy to dislike them.
My own personal favourite is a dodgy gym eqipment company which has been recently bullying various blogers for using the generic term for a group of cyclists, peloton. They can’t have the word it belongs to common language.
It’s crazy. It’s like if McDonalds tried to trademark “hamburger” and then threatened to sue people who live in Hamburg.
- jayalpha 8y agoIf I remember correctly, Disney has a trademark for "snow-white".
- kingofhdds 8y agoProtection of a generic word within particular context may be absolutely fair. Say, you made an OS, and called it "Pretzel". You can't go, and prohibit anyone to call their pretzels pretzels, but if some big corpo Shmoogle will create their own product called Pretzel OS, I'm pretty sure you'll be not ok with it. "Mc" is no different, if applied narrowly to burgers there's no reason why it can't be copyrighted, because within the context it's not in fact a generic term. Crazy behavior of copyright lawyers is a problem for sure, but a separate one.
- Lio 8y agoIn the case of the gym manufacturer they've taken a word from the sport of road cycling, peloton from the French for platoon, and are now harassing anyone using that word to describe cycling related software. What's particularly annoying is that their product is a spinning "bike" which has nothing to do with road cycling apart from pedalling. Specifically the Digital Peloton Vlog, which reviews cycling simulators and software.