Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrpippy | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure Intel's law firms are drafting a cease & desist as we speak. I'd bet $10 the name changes.

No such thing as bad publicity as they say.

They'll be cheeky, the big dinosaur corporate will come out swinging and look bad like they always do, and they'll get a load of press in the tech websites which is their target market.

I don't think this one would necessarily work out like that - here they have (seemingly) intentionally named the watch identically to a product name that already exists, in a fairly closely related field, that they should know is most likely trademarked...

The bad press comes when it feels unfair for the big company to try and pursue action but in this case it would seem that Intel would be perfectly justified...

When you apply for a trademark you have to say what type of products/services it involves.

Intel did make a smartwatch for a while, but I don't think it had a Core Due chipset!

Yeah but I think that's only a factor in the consideration. I doubt it cancels out identical and very distinct names.

Perhaps a trademark lawyer can weigh in. My understanding is that a trademark is strictly limited to the areas (both in terms of geography and vertical) claimed in the application. This is why Apple didn't have to do battle with the Beatles until they got into the music business.

Yeah because "apple" is a common term that people might reasonably expect two businesses to use. The point of trademark law is to prevent consumer confusion.

I am not a trademark lawyer and I haven't even looked this up but if Apple made a "The Beatles Laptop" then I would hope that defence doesn't apply.

The more interesting Apple trademark case was "iPhone", which was in active use by Cisco for their VoIP desk phones.

> This is why Apple didn't have to do battle with the Beatles until they got into the music business.

That went back to the Apple IIɢꜱ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosumi

The main thing is if a consumer would be confused. I don't think consumers would be confused about an ancient Intel processor and a brand new smartwarch.

Yeah, maybe... but what harm would it really do? The Core 2 line was killed off over 10 years ago in 2012.

The point of trademarks is to avoid ambiguity of origin. Pebble core 2 duo is definitely ambiguous.

To the average consumer? I doubt it.

Is it? I own a Fujifilm X-T5 camera and Cadillac makes a car called the XT5, but I don't see anyone getting confused.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com