My Thermos is full of Yo-Yos

Oct

My sister Airlie is a law student @ the U of Ottawa. She wrote me about Google & Intellectual Property after reading my Wild Rose D-Tox/Cleanse post –

“In intellectual property we’ve been discussing loss of trade-mark due to use of a word by the public that makes it generic. One example was the word “google”. It is a made up name so it has quite a lot of protection (like Kleenex and Thermos), but google is worried that people will start to use their word as a way of searching the entire internet, which would result in loss of their trade-mark (read: loss of moola!). Arguably, you did so in your blog when you said “I could Google for a better resource”. Apparently a professor down in the states entered the word googling in his online dictionary to mean search the internet. Google wrote him a nasty letter that told him the correct way to use their trade-mark.

Incorrect: I googled that hottie I met at the party last Friday.
Correct: I used google to search for the name of the hottie I met at the party last Friday.

Xerox the article if you like it.