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If you publish a sentence like go xerox that for
me,
The health-conscious wimp ordered sanka
or
I have to write this with crayolas because they won't
let me have anything sharp in here,
you will get a
letter.
The letter will explain that Xerox,
Sanka,
and Crayola
are registered trademarks, not generic
terms for copy,
decaffeinated coffee
or
crayon.
They want you to say things like Crayola
crayons,
Sanka-brand decaffeinated coffee
and
xerograph
or photocopy.
If the companies
don't act, their trademarks might fall into the public
domain, as with zipper, linoleum, heroin and aspirin.
Xerox,
Sanka
and Crayola
are
contrived words which exist only for commercial reasons. It
is fair that such words are private property to be used in
only the ways allowed by their owners.
But it is not fair when somebody claims to own a
perfectly normal word. For instance, Colorado boasts a Hard
Scrabble Creek near Pueblo. Scrabble
is an old word
that means struggle,
as in I had to scrabble to
escape from the attorneys who insisted that you should
always say 'Scrabble-brand crossword game' even when that's
not what you're talking about.
Or a number. Computer processors are identified by
number; 386
and 387
are Intel trademarks.
It's silly enough that tall buildings don't have a 13th
floor, and now there are more numbers to skip -- a book
will have to jump from page 385 to page 388, lest the
publisher run afoul of Intel trademark attorneys.
But the worst offender is the U.S. Olympic Committee. By
a 1978 act of Congress, the committee owns the words
olympic
and olympiad.
These words are not recent inventions; they date back to 776 B.C., when the ancient Greeks believed that their deities resided on Mt. Olympus. Under it was the plain of Olympia, where they held Olympic games every four years -- an Olympiad.
Nonetheless, the Olympic Committee ardently protects its ownership of words that have been in public use for at least 2,767 years.
Organizers of a Gay Olympics
were ordered to call
it something else. Odyssey of the Mind
was
Olympics of the Mind
until the committee found out.
Most recently, Kalamazoo College in Michigan was told that
its annual rodent obstacle-course race could not be called
the Rat Olympics.
Why is the Olympic Committee so zealous? Apparently, we
could get confused if somebody uses Olympics
to
describe a sporting festival that consists of amateurs
competing solely for the love of sport, rather than the
modern Olympic ideal: professionals competing for higher
paychecks, jingoism and TV ratings.
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