What makes you think any of this would dilute Lucas’s trademark rights?
Droid is better known today as a phone/operating system than the robots from Star Wars. Over time, the idea of a trademark on the word will seem silly.
Gmail’s iOS app now has push notifications. And because it isn’t using Mail, you get to have labels and everything. I don’t use it too much because I don’t need to check my work email outside work (which is always in front of a computer), but it seems pretty spiffy.
That’s not actually how trademark law works.
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Any word can conceivably become a trademark, including all the words in this sentence. It depends on what the actual use is.
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Thus, what exactly does Lucas claim as the scope of his trademark(s) related to the word “Droid”? If other uses don’t cross those bounds, his rights are not affected. In other words, if Lucas claims rights in the word “Droid” with respect to humanoid machines that appear as fictional characters then the use of “Droid” with respect to a telephone operating system doesn’t interfere at all.
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The word “dilution” has a specific meaning in trademark law. I suspect what you mean to say is that Lucas might eventually abandon his rights or that the term “Droid” might become generic.
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If, as Dewey Finn says, the use of the word “Droid” for operating system is pursuant to a license from Lucas, this use will not affect his rights, because it’s as if he were making this use himself.
I know that’s not exactly how it works, but in practice, that’s what will happen. You can go for the common “lowercase” examples like kleenex, xerox, and frisbee or you can go for something odder like “Superhero.” The trademark for “Superhero” is jointly owned by DC and Marvel, but they have tried to enforce it’s correct usage on the general media because the idea that anyone can hold a trademark on the word “Superhero” is preposterous.
This seems like a non sequitur as a response to my post. Did you even read beyond the first sentence?
What exactly do you mean by referring to “kleenex,” “xerox,” and “frisbee”? Those are actually all still enforceable trademarks.
And your reference to “Superhero” also doesn’t make sense. Trademark law doesn’t give a trademark holder any right to “enforce [its] correct usage on the general media.”
And the end also seems like a non sequitur to what you have already written. To the extent that anything is “preposterous,” how does that have any relevance to who actually wholds any enforceable rights in the term “Superhero,” whether such rights have anything to do with what the “general media” and how any of that is relevant to terms like kleenex, xerox, and frisbee. And how that has any bearing on whatever rights Lucas might have in the term “Droid”?
Exactly. “Droid” in the context of “robots in space” can be a trademark, and so can “Droid” in the context of “mobile phone”. No overlap.
Just the same as “Apple” was a trademark for a record company, and also a trademark for a computer company. Once again, no conflict, because why would a computer company ever get into the music business? :dubious:
I love this post so much, I want to have a first date with it at Starbucks, I want to be in a "its complicated with [this post] status on Facebook, I want to tweet to the world #lovethispost, I want to invent memes with the most interesting man alive about it…
sorry olives, not trying to derail your thread…
I don’t see why. Surely the “mobile phone as hip gadget” meme died off in about 2003, once the whole world had one. Does anybody really notice what phone anyone else is using these days?
I can definitely understand how you feel. I put off getting an iPad for a very long time for these reasons, and in fact the only reason I eventually bought one was because I wanted to develop for it; I still find myself using my laptop for most of my real work (except for writing; see below).
It’s been my observation that a lot of developers haven’t really taken the iPad seriously as a “proper computer”, in the sense of being able to do all the work-related tasks you can do on a laptop. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the hardware or operating system (except for a lack of a user-visible filesystem, but that’s a topic for another post). The problem is the apps.
Most productivity apps you see are simply crippled versions of what you have on the desktop. They appeal to the masses, particularly in marketing terms, because they have flashy websites and make it look like you can do everything you need. But when people actually buy these apps and try to use them, they find out that the app only contains a fraction of the functionality of its desktop counterpart. I think there’s a huge opportunity for developers to take the platform more seriously and produce fully-featured apps that make the iPad competitive with a desktop system.
One positive example I’ve seen of this is OmniGraffle for iPad. I’ve used OmniGraffle on the mac for many years, and when I tried the iPad version, as far as I could tell it had every single editing feature that the desktop version had. Multiple canvases, layers, templates, all the formatting options - everything. In contrast, do a detailed comparison of any of the popular iPad word processors and MS Word/OpenOffice on the desktop and you’ll see a huge gap in functionality - though this distinction will only be apparent to those who use some of the more advanced features of Word, like styles and cross-references.
I do a lot of writing myself (I’m a CS researcher) and when I discovered how bad the situation in the word processing market was, I realised there was an opportunity to fix it. If I’m writing a research paper or book, I need a table of contents, automatic numbering, bibliographic citations, cross-referencing, etc. None of the existing word processors provide this. About a year ago I started work on my own app for doing these things, which I released on the app store a couple of months ago (it’s called UX Write - see http://www.uxproductivity.com for more info). The app isn’t fully “there” yet, in terms of having everything you get on a desktop, but it’s already pretty capable and I’m working hard to add additional features like change tracking, citations, equation editing, and so forth. In the year since I started this I haven’t seen any serious competition appear on the iPad.
IMHO this is the kind of direction the app ecosystem needs to go in if the iPad is going to be useful for work and not just play. Computationally it’s just as powerful as the high-end workstations we had on our desks just a few years ago, so there’s no technical reason that this can’t be achieved. It’s just a matter of developers taking the effort to produce truly feature-rich apps, just like they would for a desktop OS.
You would be surprised. My husband has a 20 year old daughter. Not only did I spend several days helping her research a phone in June, but she is at it again. She just moved to Vancouver from a very small remote town a week ago. What did she want to do first? Not go to the mall, not check out the clubs, nor the beach, the mountains, nor the the music scene.
She spent 4 days on line researching the best cell phone to get, and the best plan. So she can skype message her friends back home about her adventures in the big city.
then when she finally did that… her next big “omg omg got to do this! was to buy a cellphone case.”
Lately, I’ve been noticing people ribbing friends and coworkers if they pull out a flip phone.
When I got my iPhone 4, for several months I was asked about it every time I had it out in public. I even had a professor ask about it in the middle of class when I had it out on my desk to read lecture-specific PDFs. And everyone at work has been asking me for the last several months if I was getting the 5. I imagine when I go back after this coming week’s vacation, there’ll be people asking for it. (ETA: leaving that weird wording of “asking for it” because it’s kinda humorous, but I meant “asking about it.”)