The problem is that the U.S. Patent office is filled with IDIOTS! It is illegal to have a trademark on visa, amazon, etc.... WHY?
They must be terms NOT in common use! That is why INTEL changed their processor name to PENTIUM. They actually LOST a trademark case, because as the judge so gracefully said "YOU CAN'T TRADEMARK NUMBERS"! TUCOWS can be trademarked. Coke, pepsi, xerox, barnes and nobel, intel... Can ALL be legally trademarked. Visa, The train station, amazon, visa, CAN'T! I know they DID trademark them. Hey, it is illegal for a felon to own a gun in the U.S. ALSO! You know how bad they enforce THAT! It is ALSO illegal to have a patent on one click ordering, xor graphics, or clicking a speaker to make music. WHY? Because they are obvious to people in the industry and/or have prior art. HECK, Edison used the click concept BEFORE the speaker was even invented. And that, and the phone, radio, etc.... FURTHER represented prior art invalidating the later awarded patent! This is an obvious attempt to try to own the words/market. Amazon ALREADY sued barnes and nobel for the one click ordering and won! REDICULOUS! As for a solution? I think somebody has to sue the pants off these idiots! Maybe they should go against the USPTO. BTW, you think the example YOU gave was rediculous?!? What about the man that named his company the same as his last name, *****AND***** did it YEARS before another company CHANGED its name to his. AND, they tried to sue him! His business had NOTHING to do with theirs! He was a computer consultant, they made cars! What was the outcome? Apparantly, EVERYONE lost!(This is hard to do! Usually SOMEBODY wins to some degree) Take a look: http://nissan.com/. Steve On Sun, 24 Nov 2002, at 01:47 [=GMT-0000], Andy Coates wrote: > > On Sat, 23 Nov 2002, at 12:56 [=GMT-0500], Swerve wrote: > > > > > "Visa" Torn From Dictionary by Credit Card Company > > > > > > <http://www.eff.org/Cases/Visa_v_JSL/20021121_eff_pr.html> > > > > Lucky guy that EFF will pay for the court case. Many others suffer the > > same fate, thanks to the United Nations's WIPO and and the US > > Government's > > ICANN teaming up to give us the obligatory 'arbitration' > > under the UDRP. > > Having looked over the forums (http://www.arbforum.com), I can't believe > some of those cases succeeded. Energy.biz was transferred because > someone trademarked "Energy"?!? I can't believe how stupid that is. > Same goes for sex.biz - how can someone trademark "sex"?!? > > Is anything being done about this? I'd go absolutely bonkers if someone > took a domain of mine because I hadn't trademarked it. Some people complain, like I do. But nothing happens. Unless you can afford to go to court (and you cannot pick where...), any large company (or city) with some sort of trademark (regularly they haven't one really) can grab your domain for a $1000 arbitration fee. And small companies? No, for them it is much more difficult. They do not get what they want easily from WIPO or NAF (ArbForum). Why? Guess. Recently the German town of Potsdam (near Berlin) got potsdam.com and net and org and info from a small ISP located in, yes, Potsdam. The town already had potsdam.de. Yeah. It is really sick. And it will not get better, but worse. Since the unfair decisions are quoted to obtain another unfair decision. If you can think of a good form of 'attack', let me know!
