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



....an interesting current parallel is "CBL" for Calculator-Based Laboratory.
Texas Instruments has trademarked "CBL" to obstruct others (notably CASIO)
from breaking into the market. Of course, CASIO has its own problems with
naming conventions direct from Japan corporate HQ. Their "CBL" is called
the EA-100. Don't even ask what they name their calculators.

Dan M, thinking about trademarking MBL

Dan MacIsaac, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Northern AZ Univ
danmac@nau.edu http://www.phy.nau.edu/~danmac

Hi all-
Richard Grandy makes the valid point (which I will restate)
that one cannot have a valid trademark that restricts the usage of an
ordinary descriptive term. The distinction is a bit different than Richard
states. The US Patent and Trademark Office grants a Trademark on a
showing (to state it very roughly, I don't want to drag out the statute)
that one of the following is true:
1. The word is fanciful and was previously known (Kleenex)
2. The the word, although descriptive, is used in a fanciful
context (don't use <Hefty> when referring to any old kitchen bag)
3. The word, though descriptive, has come to be associated by the
public with the particular article in question. The use of the word is
then restricted when applied to articles of a similar kind.
In the case of "levitator", it is not in my New Collegiate, so it is
apparently not a word in common use. On the other hand, it is not as fanciful
as Xerox, so I would guess that the Trademark was granted on the second of the
above grounds. William Beatty's use of the word was, I would suppose sufficiently
close to the Trademarked meaning to trouble the mark's owner.
Anyone with an interest in using the trademarked word (commercially) is,
of course, free to challenge the validity of the mark.
Regards,
Jack
I'll send my bill later.
**********************************************************
Jack, I think you are missing the crucial distinction. Before the
trademark Xerox was invented, there was no word "xerox" in the langauge;
before the trademark Kleenex was invented, there was no word "kleenex". We
could test this by looking at dictionaries published at the time of
trademarking.

On the other hand, I would bet you, seriously, that I can find the word
"levitator" in dictionaries published before the Superconductive
Components, Inc. Trademark.

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)
*****************************************



"I scored the next great triumph for science myself,
to wit, how the milk gets into the cow. Both of us
had marveled over that mystery a long time. We had
followed the cows around for years - that is, in the
daytime - but had never caught them drinking fluid of
that color."
Mark Twain, Extract from Eve's
Autobiography