logoalt Hacker News

Legend2440today at 3:50 PM3 repliesview on HN

Plenty of companies use generic words for their name, and they still get trademarks.

American Airlines for example is indeed just an American airline. The Container Store, Vision Center, General Motors, International business machines (IBM), the list goes on.

Even Microsoft is just a contraction of their original product, microcomputer software.


Replies

DrammBAtoday at 3:58 PM

I understood it more in the line of preventing a company from naming itself "Low sugar" and then blocking other companies from adding the words "Low sugar" to their packaging. Same thing with OpenAI, another company should be free to create an AI that's fully open and tag it as "Open AI" without fearing legal problems with OpenAI.

raverbashingtoday at 3:58 PM

> Even Microsoft is just a contraction of their original product, microcomputer software.

Hopefully that was also a family suggestion because I can't think of a more sloppy name than "Microcomputer software"

literalAardvarktoday at 3:54 PM

In the US

show 1 reply