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Subject:Re: Re[2]: Product names as adjectives? From:Avi Jacobson <avi_jaco -at- NETVISION -dot- NET -dot- IL> Date:Tue, 10 Jun 1997 21:21:12 +0300
J M Forsyth <jmf -at- psionworld -dot- net> wrote in article <97Jun9 -dot- 041836-0700pdt -dot- 148159-20410+6351 -at- mm1 -dot- sprynet -dot- com>...
> Fair enough, but consumers/those interested in the state of the language
> are surely entitled to some give-and-take. That is, there are cases of
> corporations registering ordinary phrases and thus taking them out of the
> language. The legality of doing so is to say the least ambiguous, but if,
> e.g., Microsoft choose to trademark the plain english sentence 'Where do
> you want to go today?', people on the other side may feel justified in
> appropriating copyrighted names as useful additions to the common
> vocabulary.
In what sense has Microsoft taken the sentence "Where do you want to go today?" out of the language? A reasonable speaker of English would be committing no offense by using this sentence in an appropriate context. The same is true of other registered sentences -- like "Just do it" and "We try harder". While it is true that the speaker or writer who innocently uses these sentence often runs the risk of sounding like he/or she is quoting a commercial, that does not detract from the use of such plain English sentences in plain English contexts.
Registering a sentence _as a trademark_ merely means it cannot be used by another corporation _as a trademark_. It probably does not restrict another corporation from using the sentence in its plain English sense: I would be hard put to imagine a court ruling against a corporation which said "we try harder" in the middle of a paragraph of prose (say, in an advertorial: "One of our achievements over the past year is that we try harder to avoid cancellations..."). And the fact that a sentence is a registered trademark _definitely_ does not restrict non-commercial entities from continuing to use the sentence in a non-commercial sense. In fact, the latter is true even of registered trademarks: the words "sun" (computers), "ban" (deodorant), and "dial" (soap) have in no sense been "taken out of the language".
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