I know Verizon has to pay Lucasfilm to use the term “Droid” for their Android phones, back when iPhones were AT&T exclusives and they were using the slogan Droid Does, but I think Lucasfilm had also specifically trademarked/copyrighted/whatever the term. I remember projects like Trillian and Babelfish took their names from the Douglas Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide properties but I don’t think they did any licensing.
Comment on We Won't Be Covering ModRetro Products Moving Forward
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 3 days agoI’m a little bit surprised that the Tolkien estate never sued them for that. I suppose the terms were never copyrighted…? But at the same time, appropriating a character or concept name from a copyrighted work and using it as a company name does seem like something a good lawyer could work with… but idk, I’m not an attorney.
jqubed@lemmy.world 3 days ago
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
was it Verizon or Motorola?
jqubed@lemmy.world 3 days ago
IIRC it was Verizon; Motorola and eventually a couple other manufacturers would sell the same phones under different names in other countries.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Mostly I have this distinct memory of badly communicating with a Verizon employee when I got my first smart phone, an LG Ally.
I remember asking “Is this a Droid?” Meaning “is the make and model of this handset a Motorola Droid?” And the reply was “They’re all droids.” meaning they all run the Android operating system. I miss LG phones, or at least the state of my personal life back when I had LG phones.
LordMayor@piefed.social 3 days ago
Trademark law would apply. Tolkien estate never used or even registered them as trademarks.
Another comment mentions Droid phone. In that case, Lucasfilm had registered “Droid” as a trademark.
bklyn@piefed.social 3 days ago
FYI: in most countries, something is granted a copyright simply by virtue of having been published. If the claimant has unpublished work, they can still make a claim if they can prove provenance. Copyright is something that happens (more or less) automatically.
The sticky part is that it’s a civil offense, and challenges must be extensively adjudicated.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Not only that, but there’s a difference between copyright and trademark. A name alone isn’t really copyrightable, especially not if its then used in a wildly different context.
That’s why all important names of creative IP generally is trademarked too.
If you build a car you can’t name it Mickey Mouse (not using any of the art, typography or anything else from Disney), not because of copyright, but because Disney holds a trademark for that name.
In trademark law, prior usage by someone else doesn’t work like in patent law. In patent law it makes the patent invalid. In trademark law it only means that the other user that’s been using the trademark before the trademark was established is allowed to continue using it, but the trademark is not invalidated.
So the Tolkien Estate can continue to use the name Anduil, and Anduil the company cannot go after them, but the Tolkien Estate can also not stop Anduil the company to use that name.
brsrklf@jlai.lu 3 days ago
For some reason, the Tolkien estate had to tell paleontologists who nicknamed an homo species “hobbits” they had to stop doing so.
But a corporation is committing pure evil under the name “Palantir” or “Anduril” and, nevermind any kind of legal action, you can’t even hear a strong word from the estate.
I guess some targets are easier than others.
LeFrog@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
From my understanding it was not the Tolkien Estate but the company SCZ?
theguardian.com/…/hobbit-banned-prehistoric-hobbi…
brsrklf@jlai.lu 3 days ago
Hmm. Looks like it.
The wikipedia article on Homo floresiensis is wrong then. It quotes another article that says the lawyers were representing the Tolkien estate, but that article too was quoting Alloway, who apparently got it wrong. Unlike the Guardian they probably didn’t bother to check and correct the article.