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Old 06-04-2003, 11:10 PM   #106
the_logos
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Mill Valley, California
Posts: 2,305
the_logos will become famous soon enough
I was going to post quite a sarcastic reply to you but then it occured to me that you may legitimately not know what you're talking about or may legitimately be confused about IP law.

The word 'Logos' is a noun stemming from neo-Platonic and classical Greek philosophy meaning the cosmic reason giving order, purpose, and intelligibility to the world. The reason I use it here, incidentally, is because in Achaea my character's name is Sarapis, usually suffixed and used as: Sarapis, the Logos.

This word is now a common noun in the English language. It is not a word like Expedia, which is made up and thus trademarked. You cannot copyright a word, or even two words. You can, however, trademark that word or two words providing you made it up or providing you're trademarking it in relation to a particular type of product. For instance, Oracle owns the word Oracle as applied to software. However, a car parts chain could also name itself Oracle. The test of trademark violation is, if I recall, generally abbreviated as whether the existing trademark holder's property would be confused with the newer one's. So, if I started a company called Oracle that made operating systems instead of database and enterprise software and called it Oracle, I'd be in trouble, since a customer is clearly going to be confused about which is the 'real' Oracle.

In a forum such as this, -any- common word can be used without either copyright infringement (since a word cannot be copyrighted to my knowledge, unless perhaps it's a made-up word) or trademark infringement, because these forums and any company named The Logos or Logos is not involved in the "market" of these forums no reasonable person is going to be confused by my using those words here.

If I wanted to call myself Expedia here, I could probably be stopped legally (though I can't imagine Microsoft would care unless I was representing myself as a Microsoft employee or spokesperson). If I wanted to call myself Apple, there's nothing Apple Computer could do about it.

Is that clear?

--matt
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