Entrepreneur, the Magazine That Sues Entrepreneurs
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
Looks like an app store issue! How can a business trademark a single English word that effectively describes the industry?
Microsoft owns the trademark for "Windows", but walk into a hardware store and you'll see dozens of companies that freely use windows in their name. I've never heard of Microsoft going after them.
Here's an example: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Microsoft_vs....
Entrepreneur, Apple and Windows aren't distinctive in their own rights (the logos might be, however), but some names certainly are.
http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/notices/international.jsp
So, you can have a "Widgets" trademark for class 9 (Electrical and scientific apparatus), and another company can own the "Widgets" trademark for class 29 (Toys and sporting goods).
Some companies do register their trademark across the whole spectrum, like Coca-Cola, and probably Nike too.
Note that pharmaceuticals are a whole different story, as there are so many of them that you can have similar-sounding ones as long as they do something very different.
> Realtor is a frequently-used word in many countries to describe any person or company involved in the real estate trade, regardless of their NAR status or American residence. However, in the United States, the National Association of Realtors in 1949 and 1950 obtained registrations for the words "Realtor" and "Realtors" as collective trade marks.
> In 2003, Jacob Joseph Zimmerman, a real estate agent who was not a member of NAR, petitioned the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to cancel the trademarks, on the ground that "Realtor" and "Realtors" were generic terms rather than a trademark. On March 31, 2004, the USPTO's Trademark Trial and Appeal Board denied the petition.
I think the only times I've ever said "realtor" has been when it was informal. Having researched the NAR, MLS, etc. before selling my house, it seemed fairly obvious that realtor was a trade name and something I just assumed was trademarked.
"The courts read any failure to protect your trademark as good reason for the courts to not help you protect it later when you find the infringement significant. As the trademark attorney in the clip noted, Elevator, Thermos, Aspirin, and Trampoline all lost their rights to their trademarks, because they didn't "police" their trademarks."
From: http://stosselintheclassroom.org/video_activityMar08.html
(Important for startups:
http://blog.startupipservices.com/archives/top-startup-trade...
I'm sure you knew already, but it doesn't hurt to reinforce the importance of trademarks.)
Edit: dotBen made a similar point further down the thread
So what is the downside in this scenario? How is Bayer hurt by not owning an Aspirin trademark any longer?
The answer is Kleenex. Now try to tell someone in a general conversation that you when you're talking about Kleenex, you meant 1) the actual company Kleenex, not the 2) product nor the 3) other generic tissue paper products. Because now you have to explain to consumers why your Kleenex is better than your competitors Kleenex, when before you could just say 'Kleenex, the brand that works' or 'Kleenex, the brand you trust' or just plain 'Kleenex'. Even if it's just a name, if you reduce the number of ways for you to differentiate your product from others, it just makes it harder to do so.
It seems silly now, but to many of these companies, it's the way for them to be unique, to stand out among the crowd. Because they came up with the word 'realtor' and 'entreprenur' to describe themselves, not to describe others. And, rightly or wrongly in this case, the government said that the words they use to describe themselves was so unique that it was worth it to legally make it theirs.
(And all the past successes of these names being turned into generic terms (Kleenex, Xerox, Aspirin) is the other reason why these companies are fighting tooth and nail to make sure it doesn't happen to them. The government has basically stated that it's a use it or lose it situation. And they are determined not to lose it. Whether or not that's a good thing....)
This is why it's ok to use the word "entrepreneur" in general, but not as the name of a magazine or "communication product".
I find it to be the absolute best small business / entrepreneur magazine out there. I prefer it over Inc and others by far.
It opens your eyes beyond tech as it covers so much ground.
A quick search on uspto.gov reveals that there are several "EMI" trademarks.
Pragmatic.
Curious side-note: when it was first introduced into Victoria Australia, Hungry Jacks (Burger King in US) failed to trademark the term "whopper", because was a generic term. But, today, it's a registered trademark. Over time, advertising can create an association.
As technologists, we may instinctively view most attempts to use the law to protect intellectual property as abusive, but at least there is a transparent, although expensive, way to solve conflicts.
Think for a moment about how brands, like Entrepreneur Magazine, are built on the internet. The authors work very hard to develop interesting content and then try to get Google to rank the content. Unless you get very large, or spend a lot of money in traditional brand advertising, it is unlikely that anyone will find your content without Google's help. If someone comes along and steals your content, and puts it on a more "trusted" site it may well be seen by more people than the original (there have been plenty of Hacker News articles pointing this out). In this case, the only redress is to try to get Google to listen - certainly an uphill battle. Again, as technologists, we may feel that Google system is fairer because its an algorithm, but when a spammer abuses the system there is rarely any redress.
The thing is, when you don't know what you don't know it takes a while to recognize good advice from piles of obvious bullshit like this magazine articles.
As several people have already pointed out, there is Windows, there is Time. Oddly no-one has yet mentioned Face and Book.
Does that mean they will sue all the companies with the word "startups" in their domain name as well?
If you have a trademark you are legally required and compelled to go after anyone who is infringing on it. Otherwise it is deemed that you have let it lapse into the public domain.
enter debate on trademarks, patents, blah blah etc...
My point is that clearly EMI should not have been awarded a trademark on the term "entrepreneur" in the first place. However, once that trademark was granted, there was no other option but for them to start aggressively guarding it.
(and to a lesser extent EMI, if they had any decency, shouldn't have attempted to trademark it).
Don't hate the player, hate the game, etc
I have personal experience of someone having to trademark something simply because if they didn't the other party was going to and then they'd have no choice but to lose all rights to it.
Like I said enter discussion about the brokenness of patents, trademarks, etc
On one hand, you probably wouldn't be noticed for not suing people for the name. No one would really have the opportunity to appreciate your benign decision to not engage an exclusivity to your trademark.
On the other hand, if you were so benign, then one day another magazine comes along, called "New Entrepreneur", and you try to defend yourself - only to find your case thrown out when they can prove you routinely don't defend your trademark.
But then again, doesn't that lead to another point? You can defend that you don't seek to have the trademark ubiquitously across industries, just in the magazine and publication industry.
Or is trademark law so sweeping that a business is unable to have a trademark in only the practicing industry? (If so, Square & Square Enix come to mind as outliers from this example.)
(and to a lesser extent EMI, if they had any decency,
shouldn't have attempted to trademark it).
The other central problem is that the US courts seem to support this blatant abuse of the law.
I'm amazed that almost invariably, when a business doing something egregiously despicable pops up hear, someone here comes up with a "don't hate the player..." type argument.
But the argument falls flat in this case. Entrepreneur Magazine could give up with their trademark tomorrow if they wished. The only thing your argument shows is that to keep their evil, parasitical business model, they have to keep aggressively pushing that evil, parasitical legal extortion on all concerned - they can't just lazily extract only a few unearned bucks from a few unlucky folks.
I think we can hate the player and the game here...
They didn't get awarded the trademark in the first place.
As the article says, Chase Revel, who started Entrepreneur in the '70s, registered the trademark for "entrepreneur" and began to enforce the mark. The trademark went along with the magazine when it was sold in '87.
As other replies to the parent comment show, people seem to feel that this sort of abuse (meaning the registering of absurdly generic trademarks) is typical of a large organisation like EMI.
The fact is, this is a false belief (at least in this case).
It's false as EMI didn't trademark the word. We can go around blaming cultures like EMI's for mistakes made by individuals decades earlier, but I don't think that's a valid way to argue. Do you?
lol Perry J. Viscounty