
This Guy Trademarked the Symbol for Pi and Took Away Our Geeky T-Shirts - ColinWright
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/pi-takedown/
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techsupporter
What bothers me almost as much is that an actual, bar-card-carrying attorney
demanded that a company cease "copyright infringement" on the basis of a
trademark.

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Oculus
Do lawyers face any repercussions for representing frivolous cases that are
used as an abusive tactic?

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pstrateman
Theoretically yes, in practice? depends on who they piss off

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rayiner
This has no legs, obviously. As Lemley points out, one of the basic principles
of trademark law is that the mark must function as a source identifier. You
can't even trademark "t-shirts with 'pi' followed by a period" if it's used in
a context where it's not functioning as a brand.

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bittermang
And yet despite it having no legs, here it is doing real damage to real people
trying to sell real products they designed, while spending their real
resources to fight this obviously toothless claim in the courts.

This is one of the many reasons why the US legal system is broken, and
backwards.

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rayiner
There's no actual claim that anybody is spending any money to fight in any
courts. Just a nastygram to a website that took down the products proactively.
Every western country has trademark laws, and you could send a similar letter
in any of them.

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ScottBurson
It has already caused people to do work they otherwise wouldn't have had to.
And what are the odds that the trademark holder will give up without
litigation?

But I agree that this isn't specific to the US.

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shittyanalogy
If this is a gimmick to highlight the incompetency of the USPTO it's a clever
one. Not only has ineptitude been used to secure trademark of one of the
oldest known symbols in common use but that legal status is being being put to
work threatening companies into halting sales and opening their books. The
corporate inconvenience and money flushing could theoretically escalate and
result in at least a tiny bit more scrutiny of how trademarks are issued.

More than likely it's a very enterprising young man interested in getting into
the same game as the patent trolls though using a different sort of legal
monopoly.

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tzs
There's nothing wrong with common symbols being trademarked. The purpose of
trademarks is to prevent misrepresentation of origin and consumer confusion.
If a company uses a common symbol to mark their products and this
distinguishes them from competing products, it would make no sense to not
allow them a trademark.

Keep in mind that trademarks are limited to particular areas of commerce. If
someone got a trademark on π as the name of a line of condoms, for instance,
that would not prevent anyone from using π as the name of a line of fishing
poles.

The problem here is not with a common symbol being trademarked. The problem
here is that "π." does not do a good job of identifying a line of clothing,
because there have been plenty of prior lines of clothing that have included
"π" on them.

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lotsofmangos
I wonder what font was used for the mark and if it has been appropriately
licenced.

edit - is the pi character from Times New Roman

[http://www.trademarks411.com/marks/85785006-pi](http://www.trademarks411.com/marks/85785006-pi)

[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pi_uc_lc.svg](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pi_uc_lc.svg)

I'm gonna trademark _< a href=_ and see if I can get the internet turned off

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shirro
Time to get a trademark on Tau before it takes off.

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psgbg
2π-ssed to do it now.

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brokentone
Crazy how these broad trademarks are allowed. Despair Inc (home of hilarious
"demotivational" posters) registered the frowny emoticon some time ago
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Despair,_Inc.#Other_works](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Despair,_Inc.#Other_works)).
They did it more as a publicity stunt to my understanding. The press release
threatening to sue people who used it on their less favorite IM programs or in
hideous font faces like comic sans was hilarious.

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evan_
Blessing in disguise- "pi" as a cultural touchstone is the dumbest thing.
Nobody's impressed that you know one thing about a circle.

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pandler
Admit that it's at least slightly better than seeing E=mc^2 tagged on
everything though...

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ColinWright
Follow up:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7830737](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7830737)

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hellbreakslose
Hmmm I guess its about time that Greece starts claiming those copyrights! Who
knows we might exit crysis at the end of the day! Lets start by copyrighting
Democracy!...

