The American Chemical Society is suing Google for freely giving away something that ACS charges $1000 a year for, oops, I mean infringing on ACS's trademark on the word “Scholar”.
Meanwhile, CNN and The News Corporation are considering suing Google over the word “news”; the American Library Association and Merriam-Webster are contemplating a similar suit over patent violations by Google Suggest; and an unknown party has contacted the law firm of Gorenstein, Lyons & Solomon to discuss Google's potentially infringing use of the word “groups”.
[via Language Log]
Update: Nitish points to an article in IEEE Spectrum about the dismal state of the US Patent and Trademark Office. The article begins by decribing a grocery store being sued for “violating Smucker's intellectual property by selling crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches”.
http://home.att.net/~jbcole/humor/Microsoft_patents.htm
Posted by: | December 12, 2004 at 11:00 AM
Nothing that a roomfull of experts could come up with in a day should be patentable.
Posted by: J Ray | December 23, 2004 at 06:15 AM