Monday, September 27, 2010

Silly lawsuits.....

There's nothing like a good tech story first thing in the morning, especially if it involved big companies taking on smaller companies where the big boys are desperately trying to trademark and take legal ownership of a word, for example, Apple and the word "pod".

Yes, Apple are going after an entrepreneur who has a video projection company with a product that started development in 2000 called "video pod". The date is important because the product was born before the "iPod" came to market.

This is, as the article notes, not the first time big tech companies have tried to trademark words. Facebook recently did it by filing a suit against "Teachbook", and then there's Microsoft and their attempts to own the word "Windows" - conveniently ignoring the fact the concept began life thanks to Xerox, naturally, and that without windows we're all in the dark.

Anyhow, this has got me pondering. If Apple are so stupid that they're going to go to court against a business that was using the word "pod" in a product name before they were, what's th betting that they'll go ahead and officially name their TV product "iTV" and then try to retrospectively sue errrr ITV?

More idiotic things have happened right?

Note: Those are vanilla pods in the picture. Unconfirmed reports suggest that Apple is considering a class action suit against God, Allah, Buddha, Vishnu, Zeus and Apollo for intellectual property theft.

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