Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Trademarks are one of the few pieces of IP that seem to make sense to me... Up to a point. It's when people are able to trademark single everyday words that it becomes farcical. I sell designs on several print-on-demand sites and occasionally dip into related forums, etc. As well as the obvious take-downs for people flagrantly violating other's intellectual property, it's fairly common for people to have their desig…
People aren’t able to “trademark single everyday words”. In fact, if a name becomes a simple everyday word the trademark can actually be lost. Thats the reason Google used to discourage people from saying Google it because they were worried they would lose the trademark to the name. What one can do is apply for a trademark to a common word to be used in a specific well defined context where it’s clear it’s applying t…
The short story is that I’d get a form denial for each attempt to use Future, but without any specified reason. A few months later the national phone company launched a new service which they called The Department of the Future - and it suddenly became clear to me why all my names had been denied.
Still feel some bitterness that such an obvious and generic word could be trade-marked - especially as it was an English word and English wasn’t as widespread in Sweden back then as it is now.
Needless to say (for anyone familiar with Telia) Department of the Future was a business failure.