SensoryMetrics » trademarks

Trademark Wars: Will the REAL NetBook please rise!

Mitch Brisebois — Thu, 21 May 2009 00:16:17 +0000

Love ‘em or hate ‘em. NetBooks are here to stay. You may have heard about the trademark controversy that erupted last December over the term “netbook”. Psion Teklogix, a Canadian manufacturer of industrial grade POS and mobile terminals filed a trademark application way back in 1996! They were granted the exclusive rights for “netbook” as it relates to a portable computer November 21, 2000.

But, Intel and a bunch of other vendors have used the phrase in billions of impressions for the past 2 years. Psion sued… but to what use?

The current CEO, John Conoley of Psion lists his expertise on LinkedIn as “Company Repositioning and Operational Turnaround” – yikes, doesn’t sound promising for Psion. We tried to reach Mr Conoley, no reply yet.

One thing we’re sure of: the mobile computing public does NOT want a Psion 8525 G2 (shown above) running Windows CE as their only choice of a netbook!

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Dell’s Audacity™: Cloud Computing™

Mitch Brisebois — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:30:04 +0000

On March 23, 2007, Dell decided that it deserved to own the trademark for “cloud computing”. This week, The US Patent and Trademark Office is likely to reject that claim (according to the Register ). It seems an odd play on the part of Dell – its name isn’t exactly synonymous with cloud computing (as we know it via Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc.)

Back in 1997, NetCentric Corporation attempted to trademark the term but soon abandoned it. Mountain View-based VirtualMin is trying to trademark the term “Cloud Computing Everywhere”, while another California company, 3Tera is applying to trademark “Cloud Computing Without Compromise.”

So far, nobody has trademarked “Cloud Computing With Compromise.”

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The Green Shaft: What if politicians highjacked your corporate identity?

Mitch Brisebois — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 14:31:45 +0000

Worse than highjacking… but actually naming a new tax after you! That’s right… it could have been the new “Mitel Tax” or “Entrust Tax” or “iotum Tax”. In this case, it’s The Green Shift Tax.

Green Shift happens to be a Toronto based consultancy specializing in corporate environmentalism. Their name is trademarked. Recently, the bumbling Liberal Party of Canada appropriated the name for its new proposed tax on carbon footprints. So far the Liberals have ignored cease and desist orders from the company’s lawyers.

What’s really funny is chief bumbler, Stephane Dion’s response to the mess – stating that sharing its name with a wonderful new tax shouldn’t hurt the company. Dion has also claimed that Canadians would be more than happy to have a new tax!

BTW – Happy Independence day to our American readers. You can celebrate the fact that the Liberal Party doesn’t have a US branch!

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Trademarks, Scrabble, Facebook, Scrabulous, Addiction, Withdrawal

Mitch Brisebois — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 01:30:56 +0000

It took Nadine and I about 20 minutes to create this Scrabulous masterpiece. Its combined worth is a mere 57… but really it’s priceless!

Since the Facebook Goldrush began last year, Scrabulous has become one of the top ten apps. No wonder. Nobody wants to play scrabble with you! Especially if you’re a sore winner!! The networked version.. playing against anybody was sure to be a hit. That’s what Jayant Agarwalla thought when he launched Scrabulous. The 21 year-old has 600,000 daily users – a sure hit. That gets everyone’s attention.Including Hasbro… the maker of the original board game.TechCruch reports that Hasbro served notice to Facebook to shut it down.

Three things are worth considering. First, are the rules of a board game considered intellectual property? (yes they are) Second, how long does the protection last. If Hasbro is claiming patent protection they’re out of luck. Trademark-wise, they could argue that Scrabulous is too much like Scrabble. If Hasbro goes with Copyright – the design of their board… it’s tenuous. Third, why didn’t Hasbro think of the obvious?? Why did it take this long to take action. I know a lot of Scrabble freaks that have rediscovered Scrabble online and are pulling out their board game version.

Effectively, Hasbro is only punishing it’s most ardent Scrabble fans because its chief-MBA-Lame-Ass didn’t catch on to the “online phenomena”.

I thought only Apple punished their customers for REALLY LOVING the product

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SpiceWorks 2.0: Watch out for the Mattel Lawyers!

Mitch Brisebois — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 22:39:40 +0000

The SpiceWorks site and product are a dream Web 2.0 implementation. It’s a cool product that helps you better manage your IT network. They’re now giving existing customers a sneak peak at version 2.0. It’s all good, although I fear their new logo will get the wheels of trademark lawyers running “Hot”!!

Tags: SpiceWorks, Mattel, Trademarks

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NASa: It’s like NAScar, for geeks

Mitch Brisebois — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:34:04 +0000

According to Wired, NASA is looking for a new catchier slogan to promote itself. Recently it’s had the bland “Explore, Discover, Understand”. It almost launched a new campaign with the twisted “NASA explores for answers that power our future.” On one site it boasts the math-challenged “Inspiration + Innovation + Discovery = Future” mmm. Doesn’t really add up!

Lucky for NASA, the Wired bloggers are taking up the challenge with a slogan contest. Enter your own or vote for your favorite. Some samples…

See the Moon? Yeah, we hit that.
NASA: Because Intelligent life is so hard to find these days.
NASA: When I was your age, Pluto was a planet
Space. Like We Have A Choice.
Because in space no one can hear Britney sing
All your space are belong to U.S.

Oddly, NASA has never actually trademarked any of its slogans. The NASA Federal Credit Union has “Like no other credit union on earth.”

photo: The Planet of the Apes

Tags: NASA, slogans, trademarks

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Life Technology (TM): New Age Crap 2.0 (TM)

Mitch Brisebois — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 13:38:16 +0000

We stumbled upon this eBay store (strangely because this blog was getting referred traffic from it…) It’s a simple new age store selling the usual magic crystals that guarantee you money, love and well-being. No sane individual should go out the door without their crystals on… They also sell variants of hieronymous machines – contraptions designed in the 1940s that emit frequencies that supposedly will bring you happiness, career success, strength, and even reversal of aging. One model, The ARK (pictured here) looks easy enough to use – it just has 6 knobs… not sure if they support Facebook integration…

Obviously it’s pretty easy to doubt the claims of these new age vendors. But it’s a free world and people can believe what they want. I have no issue there. What really bugs me is that the folks behind Life Technology put a TM after every product or phrase in their catalog. To make it even worse, none of these terms have actual applications with the Patent and Trademark Office. So there’s the lie – nothing is actually trademarked… Not even my favourite product The 12 Strand DNA Activation (TM) CD – where by listening to special sounds will “activate” my DNA to give me energy and protection against disease… who knew my DNA was actually de-activated???

Tags: Life-Technology, alternative-health, new-age, ebay, crystals, trademarks

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WHOIS: Java, AJAX, C++, Ruby, Linux, Perl, Visual Everything…

Mitch Brisebois — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 14:01:33 +0000

All this small talk about programming languages drove me to the US Patent & Trademark office… Of course Sun owns the trademarks for Java, and JavaScript. Linus Torvalds used to own Linux – but this has been transfered to a dude named William Croce. David Hansson (another Fin) owns Ruby on Rails. Appropriately the non-profit Perl Foundation owns the Perl moniker. Fortran and Cobol are public domain, although attempts were made to trademark “Visual Cobol”! As for Microsoft, they are the kings of all things visual: Visual C++, Visual C#, and Visual Basic.

Oddly enough, the AJAX trademark is owned by Konami – the game manafacturer. Although their AJAX is a programming language, it’s not asynchronous javascript.

Tags: trademarks, programming-languages

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