Why do Big Corps get trademarks of every day words? | Hacker News Reader

Why do Big Corps get trademarks of every day words?

5 pointslexokoh6 comments

Following the Decease letter from Figma to Loveable on the "Dev Mode" trademark. It's ridiculous, but it's common.

Basecamp owns the "Hey" trademark. (I received a decease email from them when I was building hey.new)

Oracle owns the "MySQL" trademark.

So, I'm not surprised that Figma owns the trademark "Dev Mode."

Big Corps owns trademarks all the time. It's not right, but they do for several reasons. Most don't make sense to me.

Maybe IP? What do you think?

I won't be surprised if OpenAI trademarks "Chat" and "AI".

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I have some experience here (built : https://www.simmons-simmons.com/en/products/trademark-rocket...) which as an ML trademark predictor that lawyers use.

There's nothing explicitly stopping people trademarking "Dev Mode" but there's all sorts of things around which Goods and Services you're using - which there must be related to your business and a thing called "Proof of use" which is what is sounds like - which means you actually can't just trademark all the words in the dictionary, you have to be actively using it on relevant things.

Saw some comments on twitter saying "oh but xyz used that term in 1998" - that doesn't get taken into account since at that point it's not a trademark. You don't have to be first, just the first to trademark it + it has to be relevant to your business and you have to be using it ;)

The clashes are down to an assessment of aural, visual and conceptual similarity (some fun NLP in there!) if multiple corps use the same terms, or similar terms.

Oddly terms like "Apple" get extra protection for being well known names associate with clear brands.

So if i am using a term like "random" in my product i can trademark that? Or maybe my product is called "Random" or "Numbers"

What is confusing about it? Trademarks are there so consumers aren’t being misled in the market and not getting the thing they expect. It’s annoying that you had to come up with a different brand, but it’s pretty understandable that Basecamp doesn’t want someone to mistake their software product for yours. Its also reasonable that if your product was a new energy drink that you could ignore them since the trademark almost certainly isn’t that broad

Still, these are random words. For example, "Dev Mode" by Figma is a dev word, and you relate that to development, not Figma.

That isn't very clear. There's also the MySQL one, which is a trademarked technical term.

You're better off asking an IP/trademark lawyer than HN.

Fair point. I think Lawyers will say trademark what you can. My question is around the ethics of trademarking random words and restricting others from using it.

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