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RE: Don't you dare say "levitator!"





On Wed, 1 Jul 1998, Richard Grandy wrote:

I think that most of us recognize that if you coin a new term, even if it
is a minor variant of an earlier word like "xerography", that you have a
claim. But it seems outrageous to allow claims to pre-existing words.

Richard Grandy
Philosophy
Rice University (neighbor to Paul Chu)



How about patterns of pre-existing words? I got a polite threat from IDG
Books Worldwide when I frivolously titled a document "Lenses for Dummies"
at my web site. They informed me (by e-mail) that the pattern "... for
Dummies" is their "intellectual property", being a registered trademark.
To claim "dummies" as intellectual property struck me as amusing. There's
another company which no doubt has a lock on "The complete idiot's guide
to ..."

-- Donald

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Dr. Donald E. Simanek Office: 717-893-2079
Professor of Physics FAX: 717-893-2048
Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania, Lock Haven, PA. 17745
dsimanek@eagle.lhup.edu http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek
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