[Corpora-List] phrase as trademark

William H Fletcher fletcher at usna.edu
Wed Feb 9 16:56:47 UTC 2011


In fact, even Sarah Palin and her daughter Bristol have trademarked their
names!

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2011/02/02/protecting-the-palin-brand-sarah-and
-bristol-go-for-trademark-s/

-----Original Message-----
From: corpora-bounces at uib.no [mailto:corpora-bounces at uib.no] On Behalf Of
Kevin B. Cohen
Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2011 11:41 AM
To: Geoffrey Sampson
Cc: corpora at uib.no
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] phrase as trademark

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/033399
7581/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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