>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 designs rejected because some completely innocuous word used in the title or description has been trademarked somewhere by someone. [0]
It's doubly farcical when [as in the Google example] the company owning the trademark in question has actually lifted it themselves from popular culture. [1]
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 to your company.
And once you get a trademark you don’t automatically own it forever. You have to actively use it and defend its use.
Of course, much like anything else in the world, there will be edge cases where the situation is murky and other cases where the outcomes appear outright wrong to most impartial observers. But that’s an artifact of the inherent complexity in trying to balance the various needs as opposed to a problem intrinsic to trademarks themselves.
I moved from England to Sweden in 1997, and tried to setup an internet-design company there, in a time before it was a tech and startup hub. I wanted to have Future in my company name, and applied to the authority that decided this (PRV) with a string of alternatives: I remember FutureDeluxe and FutureLab as two favorites - and because at that time the process involved requesting some special papers, which one filled-in then returned and waited 5 or 6 weeks for an answer that came back in the post, in the meantime I would buy the .com domain for each of these series of names. So for a year after that I held maybe 6 or 7 domains with Future in the name, all of which I allowed to lapse and have since become websites for established companies.
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.
Either that's not correct, or the lawyers employed by these companies don't know the law because I [and other people] have definitely had designs rejected by POD sites for "trademark violation" when there was obviously no intent to "pass off" [which is what trade-marking is meant to prevent].
Someone just happened to have used a trademarked word in a design or its title or description.
I suggest you have a trawl through that reddit link I posted above and read a few of the threads where people have posted examples of this happening to them.
If the product isn't directly competing, that is insane to call a common word or phrase intellectual property. Before you know it somebody will try to trademark taco tuesday.
Trademarks only apply within classes of goods and services you're a) in business in and b) have registered them in and c) in the countries you've filed applications in.
In fact, in the field of Restaurant Services, two existing usages dating back to 1979 exist - one held by Taco John's everywhere except New Jersey[1] and one held by a hotel only in NJ[2].
And it looks like they're having a court case to see who truly owns Taco Tuesday®.
But none of those Taco Tuesday trademarks would prevent you from selling an app called Taco Tuesday that has nothing to do with food. Or start a clothing brand called Taco Tuesday. Etc. etc.
Trademarks are one of the few pieces of IP that seem to make sense to me.
They protect consumers by letting the consumer trust a trademark is what they think it is, they aren't overly broad and they aren't automatic.