- #SHORTER OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY SATIRE PROFESSIONAL#
- #SHORTER OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY SATIRE FREE#
In the mid-1960s, the professional association of trademark agents in Britain, ITMA, complained to the Patent Office that its trademark examiners were overly dependent on Webster's International Dictionary. Given that objections raised by trademark examiners at the Patent Office could depend on which dictionary they consulted, practitioners in Britain became increasingly concerned to know which dictionaries were instituted as 'works of reference' in the Patent Office. Fig 1: A Trademark Examiner at the Patent Office. Intellectual property offices on both sides of the Atlantic were ergonomically designed in such a way that dictionaries were always ready to hand (see. 4 More significant, perhaps, was the routine use of dictionaries in patent and trademark offices, where they were frequently consulted in the analysis of trademark applications, again to determine whether a term was sufficiently distinctive or 'fancy' to qualify as a trademark. The primary use of dictionaries was to determine whether a mark was, or had become, descriptive of goods and services, and some older English cases characterised that exercise in terms of a defence of the public domain of language. The recollection of a leading English intellectual property barrister, who apparently won a trademark case by finding a contested mark in the Webster's Dictionary, which he had "laboriously carted to Court and to the House of Lords," 2 illustrates the authority that dictionaries could exercise in trademark cases.
The dictionary as law bookĭictionaries, the end products of lexicographical technique, have long been an essential resource for trademark litigation and trademark bureaucracies. In doing so, we follow dictionaries rather than legal texts or jurisdictions, and the specific trajectories of Webster's International and the Oxford English Dictionary traverse the Atlantic, tacking between British and US trademark law. We focus on the story of how in the middle decades of the twentieth century the techniques of the modern discipline of lexicography were drawn into a debate over the rights of trademark holders. Trademark holders are obviously alert to the danger of a lapse into genericness, and this attentiveness gave rise to the particular co-implication of technique and property that we explore in this article. Trademarks are liable to lapse into genericity, and hence to become non-proprietary common nouns the best examples are words such as 'thermos', 'cellophane', 'frisbee', and 'escalator'.
#SHORTER OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY SATIRE FREE#
A brand name such as 'Apple' adopts a common noun, but it does so without encroaching on the everyday use of that noun indeed, if the dominant legal theory of trademarks is right, the transformation of 'apple' into a proprietary term adds a sense that is free for all to use (for non-commercial purposes). Trademarks do not necessarily subtract from the available stock of words. Here, we address the question whether or to what extent trademarks give their holders rights of ownership and control over ordinary language. Leaving aside the case of pharmaceuticals, scholars interested in the commodification of scientific knowledge have not yet paid as much attention to trademarks as they have to patents, despite the fact that brands (and hence trademarks) often play a significant role in the constitution of corporate form and the securing of market positions.
Our contribution focuses on the fabrication of the legal form of the trademark. The theme of this special issue invites reflection on the role played by techniques, practices or equipment of various kinds in the fabrication of intellectual property. The higher court took the position that the questions on our poll were couched in terms calculated to lead the witness into giving us favourable answers." WG Reynolds to The lower court chose our poll and declared the defendant to be an infringer of our valid trademark. The opposing poll showed that the public related the word solely to transparent wrapping paper regardless of who made it. Our poll showed that the public related the word -cellophane-solely to the DuPont Company and its transparent wrapping paper. Field (ITMA) and Ward Dyer (UK Patent Office) in "Webster's International 30 More than three decades after the famous cellophane trademark litigation, the last surviving attorney who represented DuPont, TW Stephenson, recalled how the litigation involved "two sets of public polls one from us and the other from the Waxed Products Company. Lexical properties: Trademarks, dictionaries, and the sense of the generic 1 9 This difference was also made explicit in the framework of trademark litigation see " TARZAN" Trade Mark FSR 271 'Rotorake' Trade Mark' RPC 36.
0 kommentar(er)
