Robert A. Uhl

Trademark law exists for a simple reason: to prevent confusion between similar product. It is a violation of Microsoft’s trademark to sell a word processor called Word; it is a violation of Ford’s trademark to sell a car called a Ford. It’s perfectly okay to sell a word processor called Ford or a car named Word, though: trademarks only apply to a certain field of endeavour.

The computer world can have name collisions too, sometimes imaginary and sometimes quite real. In the former category we have Sun’s Yellow Pages service (a bunch of yp-* commands like yppasswd); Bell forced them to change it, despite the fact that computers are a different field of endeavour.

In the category of real conflicts we have Apple’s iCal, which infringes on the name of the much older (and still in active use) ical. Then there’s Adobe’s Flex, which uses the name of the flex lexical analyser which dates back to around 1982 and is, again, still in active use.

How hard is it to just google a possible product name? Apple could have chosen another name for their product (iCalendar, iSchedule, iTime, iDates, whatever — or just sanely called it something without the ‘i’); Adobe could have called Flex FlexWeb, Flux, WebFlex, FX or any of a number of names. But no, they had to take another project’s name. Gosh, thanks guys.