
Lawsuits in motion
Am I the only one that things this is fecking hilarious? :D
A US software company is taking BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion to court over its use of the name BBX for its new operating system. BASIS International filed a motion for a preliminary injunction against RIM to stop it from using BBX, which it claims is an "incontestable federally registered trademark" of the company. “ …
Actually, the name of their product is BBx, not BBX, according to its Wikipedia page that has been updated like 20 pages since its creation five years ago. Real famous product. We can assume this lawsuit will only benefit a handful of lawyers.
H6242 – Kill all the lawyers
The company I work for has an internal department known as SGI. There's a drawing application for the Mac called "Acorn". "ATM" has at least three common meanings. "RISC OS" was used by both Acorn and DEC (and I worked in ART in Cambridge when there were two companies by that abbreviation in the city, one part of Acorn). ArtWorks was both an art package used for magazine layouts (q.v. Xara/Computer Concepts), and a magazine about publishing.
I don't mind a certain amount of failing to search for shared names (especially in the pre-search engine days - vax, for example) but I can't help thinking that a little trip to acronymfinder to check there's at least nothing in common use in the same industry would avoid a lot of tooth grinding. I'm sure we've not used all the TLAs, let alone the ETLAs or DETLAs yet.