[Corpora-List] phrase as trademark

[Kevin B. Cohen]

Geoffrey,

There's a great chapter on trademark law and corpus linguistics in
Roger Shuy's "Linguistic Battles in Trademark Disputes"
(http://www.amazon.com/Linguistic-Battles-Trademark-Disputes-Roger/dp/0333997581/ref=sr_1_fkmr2_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1297269563&sr=8-3-fkmr2).
 You'd be surprised at what's trademarkable, at least in the US.

Kev

On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 5:10 AM, Geoffrey Sampson <grs2 at sussex.ac.uk> wrote:
> I have just come across what strikes me as one of the oddest
> language-related news items I have seen for a long time, tucked away at the
> back of the business section of my daily paper.  Apparently the new film
> "The King's Speech" had a sentence within the credits "no animals were hurt
> in the making of this film" (I haven't seen the film, so I don't know how
> this is relevant to a story about George VI's stammer); and the American
> Humane Society forced them to remove it, because they have registered the
> words "no animals were hurt" as a trademark which cannot be used without
> their permission (within the USA, I presume; but the film-makers will have
> wanted to include the USA in their distribution).  What next?  Is it going
> to happen one day that if I ask my wife or daughter "How are you feeling
> this morning?" some healthcare company is going to have me for misuse of a
> trademark??  (OK, I realize that word-of-mouth as opposed to writing
> probably wouldn't fall within trademark law, but nevertheless ...)
>
> Geoffrey Sampson
>
>
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-- 
Kevin Bretonnel Cohen, PhD
Biomedical Text Mining Group Lead, Center for Computational
Pharmacology, U. Colorado School of Medicine
and
Lead Artificial Intelligence Engineer, The MITRE Corporation, Human
Language Technology Division
303-916-2417 (cell) 303-377-9194 (home)
http://compbio.ucdenver.edu/Hunter_lab/Cohen

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