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Comment by dotBen | Hacker News Reader

Here's a sideways look at this:

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

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Don't hate the player, hate the game, etc

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...

As I said elsewhere, if they gave up the trademark, someone else would probably register it and do the same. Thus hate the game.

And I suppose if I didn’t <negative action verb> your <relative>, some other bloke would?

And that person would be despicable as well, thus it is a false dichotomy for anyone to assert that because the game is worth hating, those who choose to play a hated game are exempt from scorn.

…clearly EMI should not have been awarded a trademark on the term "entrepreneur" in the first place.

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.

Don't you think this might be taking pedantry a bit too far? While technically true, it doesn't really add value to the conversation.

No, I don't think this is taking pedantry a bit too far.

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?

  (and to a lesser extent EMI, if they had any decency,
  shouldn't have attempted to trademark it).

This is not something 'to a lesser extent': this one of the central problems. (Legal) Persons should take responsibility and not abuse the law.

The other central problem is that the US courts seem to support this blatant abuse of the law.

That's kind of a can of worms.

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.)

Both are guilty of this. EMI wasn't under duress to trademark it.

Unless someone else was threatening to trademark it instead.

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

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