🚀 go-pugleaf

First, change every instance of "copyright" to "trademark" in this
discussion.  In the U.S., trademarks are not protected by copyright
law.  They are protected by trademark law, which is quite a different
thing.

Trademarks that are not registered are followed by (tm) when they
appear in advertising copy and other places.  Trademarks that are
registered are followed by (R).  (In both cases, the preferred glyph is
an actual circle around the letter or letters, not parentheses.)  You
don't have to register a trademark to use it, but it helps if you have
to go to court over it.

Until not too long ago, trademark law included a "use it or lose it"
provision -- if you claimed a trademark but didn't use it, and somebody
else began to use it, it was theirs.  This has been muddied by recent
legislation, but I don't know the details.

It has been established for at least twenty years that digits are not
significant characters in a trademark, e.g., "Intel386" is the same
mark as "Intel" and "386" is null.  An ancient reference is the
computer language trademark "Simscript IV", which was not called
"Simscript 4" because of the digit-string problem.

Zilog tried to trademark "Z" (as in "Z80", a massively popular uCPU a
decade ago), but the Patent&Trademark office wouldn't let them have it.
Too short.

	"two different products can use the same (copyrighted) name as
	long as there is no chance of confusion."

This is true only for certain classes of trademark word.  Trademark
words are organized into four different classes, depending on how
obscure the word is.  A totally made up word like "Pentium" could not
be used to trademark anything, even laundry soap, without the owner's
permission.  A common word like "Shell" can be used for both petroleum
products and playing cards if it would not cause confusion in the mind
of the average person.

  -=- Andrew Klossner  (andrew@frip.wv.tek.com)
                       (uunet!tektronix!frip.WV.TEK!andrew)