Monday, 21 February 2011
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When does a trademark end?
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05:31 PM
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 In my world, a term that seems particularly caught in the middle is the word JavaScript, which is the name of a programming language that's used in browsers. JavaScript was invented at Netscape and was included in that browser; Netscape held a trademark on the name. This trademark somehow wended its way to Sun Microsystems; when Sun was bought by Oracle, Oracle inherited the name. As of right this second, Oracle is the official trademark holder.
Update 27 Feb 2011 Be sure you read the comments.
The official story is that JavaScript is one implementation -- "dialect" -- of the language whose uber-official name is ECMAScript. There are other dialects and implementations, of which the most prominent would be JScript, which is Microsoft's flavor of ECMAScript. Each browser manufacturer implements their own version of ECMAScript; in Internet Explorer, for example, the default ECMAScript implementation is JScript.
On the other hand, the term JavaScript is ubiquitous in the world of web programming. And I mean ubiquitious -- Google currently gets around 703 million hits for the term. The term is widely used without attribution to its trademark status; for example, it appears as part of the acronym AJAX, which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, and is a programming technique that involves, um, ECMAScript.
The question, then, is at what point the term JavaScript becomes the de facto generic term for ECMAScript. I am unaware of any effort whatsoever on anyone's part to defend the trademark on JavaScript; contrast efforts by (e.g.) Xerox and Google to make sure that people are aware that these are still trademarks.
In the world of computer tech writing and editing, discussion periodically breaks out about this. We went through such an exercise just recently. On the one hand are those who worry about the trademark. They will recommend that we use verbiage like "... ECMAScript (JavaScript or JScript) ...". On the other side are those who point out the effective use of JavaScript as a generic term and that moreover, few people seem to understand what the heck ECMAScript even is. (Around 1.1 million hits on Google -- a 700-fold difference.)
After the smoke cleared around this discussion last week, the word that came down was ... guess?
Well, I work for a large corporation that spends a lot of time in court defending itself, so it's not a stretch to deduce that Legal remains firm about the trademark status of JavaScript.
I kind of wish that there would be an attempt by (at the moment) Oracle to try to defend the trademark on JavaScript, so we can clear this business up. As I suggest earlier, I think that the term has become almost indefensible as a trademark. But I'm no lawyer, so don't quote me on that.
Perhaps someone can enlighten me.
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