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Meta given 30 days to cease using the name Threads by company that trademarked it 11 years ago
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this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Not an expert either, and I'm definitely not a lawyer. But I did take an elective class in uni on IPR.
Generally you can have two types of trademarks. You can use graphics as your trademark or a word. And your trademark must be unique to be defendable.
The word can't be something that is already in use, if you want to register it as a wordmark. Ie you can't register the word "beer" and market beer under that trademark. What you can register is alternative spelling or your logo.
The word "threads" is a word that was used previously. It has a meaning already. So you can't register it as a wordmark.
This is one of the reasons why alphabet really hates that people use the word "google" as a verb, or LEGO that people call the bricks "legos", as it diminishes the trademarkability of the word and thus makes defending the trademark harder.
If both companies tries to claim the word "threads" they'll have a pretty weak case. While I don't know exactly what this is about, I suspect that the headline doesn't give the full picture of the dispute.
It depends. Apple is a valid trademark for a computers/electronics company, despite being a common name. It wouldn't work if you tried to trademark it as an apple pie brand however.
I assume whoever owns this threads trademark is in the software business too, they may have a valid claim if so.
So what you're saying is they can rename it threadz. You're hired!
Why do you think that so many companies have ordinary sounding names with weird spelling? Sure, it communicates "We're hip and creative", but it's definitely also a trademark thing.
would the enforceability of a trademark in this situation not also depend on whether an average person could easily distinguish the meta threads app from the other company? It's been a while since I took this class and admittedly it was for non-majors but the way it was explained to us is that you can open a used car lot called "McDonald's", you just can't sell burgers or lead people to believe that the burger joint is now selling used cars.
Probably, I don't know, TBH the elective course I took was single week of summer school, 2 ECTS points, passed by attendance. And it was around 2010.