By the way, this is a timely reminder.
If you have a brand that you want to protect, go get a trademark registered. It'll cost you a few thousand dollars at most. Less if you play not-a-lawyer-lotto and do it yourself.
If you have a brand that you want to protect, go get a trademark registered. It'll cost you a few thousand dollars at most. Less if you play not-a-lawyer-lotto and do it yourself.
this is just silly.
As you can have books about anything, and you're free to label your book accordingly (ie in a desciptive manner), trademarks on book titles are probably hard to enforce as long as the author is not actively deceptive by choice of artwork, book design etc (ask the trademark lawyer of your choice for a definitive answer).
Having a book called 'The Life of Harry Potter' about an actual person with that name should be fine (this is not legal advice ;)). Having a book about a fictuous sorcerer of that name is a problem if you're not associated with JKR. At that point, copyright law might come into play as well.
if "my space" was a brand, would they _really_ be able to forbid me to publish a book called "my space and time" based on that trademark ?
if they actually could, the world would be even sillier than previously thought. and I'd see it burn, gladly.
You can use a trademark in a title even when the book isn't about that trademarked product. There's a book titled "Amazon Warriors" which has nothing to do with Amazon. This is trademark fair use. Some trademarks create new words in order to avoid this possibility.
So no, a hypothetical "My Space" could not forbid you to write a book titled "My Space and Time". There are exceptions, like if there's a reasonable likelihood of confusion. For example, the title "My Space and Time Magazine Award Winner" is almost certainly a no-no because it implies endorsement which isn't present.
Using "space" as a prefix is a cliche in science fiction. "Spaceship", "space station". "The spacelanes have been packed with spacetraders this whole space year. The space police should send some space fighters on space patrol."
From the NewsRadio episode "Space": "Your space pod is so cold and drafty." "Fine, I'll get a space heater." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NDiBCD55-Y#t=10m40s