It has to do with the fact that a company has to trademark their name in association with the type of business they will be using it with. It was OK for Apple computer to trademark "Apple" for use with a computer business, but not OK to use "Apple" when they started selling music. Beatles had already trademarked the word "Apple" for a music business, so they took offense when Apple computer started selling music.
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Zoom not Xoom
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It has to do with the fact that a company has to trademark their name in association with the type of business they will be using it with. It was OK for Apple computer to trademark "Apple" for use with a computer business, but not OK to use "Apple" when they started selling music. Beatles had already trademarked the word "Apple" for a music business, so they took offense when Apple computer started selling music.
You are mistaken ... I worked with an Intellectual Property lawyer for 5 years and spent $1000s of dollars working on Trademarks. In many instances what you are referring to are only applications of the word Zoom using a certain font ... so basically people will try to trademark a word using a font that they created. Starting a Trademark application and having it approved takes years.
I will say it again ... nobody has a Trademark on a common word like Zoom ... if they allowed someone to trademark Zoom ... nobody else would be able to use the word.
to help clarify ... yes, you would be able to Trademark the Zoom below, just not the word itself.
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This is not wrong at all. This phenomenon is something that companies dread and it's economics 101. It's part of the curse of your product becoming a household name. It even happens with iPods. I know a lot of people who call any MP3 player an iPod. The only thing different there is that Apple is about the only game in town for MP3 players, so it doesn't hurt them as much as it would Kleenex. Plus, people are so Apple crazy these days, they mostly know the difference. When was the last time you cared what brand of tissues you bought? As long as they're soft and they catch your snot, who cares if they're Kleenex brand?
But I digress. My honest theory about Xoom is that they didn't want the name to look too much like Zune, which was a massive failure. Unfortunately the Xoom has been a pretty big failure anyway, but not because of any association to Microsoft's product.
Just as a side note, and I'm not expecting anyone to believe me on this, because it's purely anecdotal: I live in the Chicago area where Motorola is based and being in the IT business, I know a few people associated with Motorola. The general consensus among the people I've talked that work there is that the Xoom should never have been released in its current format.
EDIT: Sorry rdowns--didn't see that you had the exact same theory above!
I don't really want to get into it, but if you trademark a word, you do not "literally own the word." If Apple had been able to tardemark the word apple, you would most certainly would not "literally have to pay them every time the word 'apple' was used." And that's not the entire point of a trademark - far from it.
It's true that a trademark can become genericized through its popularity and use, and many famous brands have lost its trademark, but most companies nowadays have sophisticated enough lawyers that they wouldn't let that happen to their brands. I have to say, though, that everyone I know uses "google" as a verb when talking about search. EVERYONE.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4 Safari/6533.18.5)
Texas actually does hold a trademark and copyright on a shade of burnt orange that anyone who uses it for commercial purposes must pay royalties for.
syclick said:supermac96 said:
Florida called. They said to look for a cease & desist in the mail.
Texas actually does hold a trademark and copyright on a shade of burnt orange that anyone who uses it for commercial purposes must pay royalties for.
Actually someone might. Zoom used to be a modem manufacturer so it's not incomprehensible that someone has a copyright/trademark/patent on the name relative to computer equipment.
Hey, if Apple can start the App Store vs Appstore spitball battle...
closes topic to tablet and xoom is a tablet. thought about putting it on community discussion but whatever.
You can most certainly trademark common words.
Anyway, I like Xoom instead of Zoom. Makes it seem more exotic.
I get your point, and I was generalizing a lot. But I assumed most everyone understood what I meant.
Here's a much better breakdown of how trademark really works, and oddly enough, it even uses Apple as an example.
According to the US patent and trademark office, a trademark on a word means "ownership" of the word. It also gives you "exclusive right to use the mark nationwide " and allows you to "bring an action concerning the mark in federal court" on anyone else that attempts to use the word..
Google will lose their trademark sooner or later. Pretty much every knows this. Google isn't even fighting it.
Also, apple cannot get a trademark because the name has nothing to do with the product!
