[WikiEN-l] AstroWikipedia

Wed Oct 15 13:58:59 UTC 2003

 From: "Nikola Smolenski" <smolensk at eunet.yu>

> On Tuesday 14 October 2003 14:20, Imran Ghory wrote:
> > On Sun, 12 Oct 2003, cprompt wrote:
> > > Don't see any reason to. They're not claiming to be connected to
> > > Wikipedia, and Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and all our other sites all list
> > > which sites are ours.
> >
> > IANAL. But, my understand is that general use of the term Wikipedia
could
> > generify it, thus preventing the Wikimedia foundation from gaining a
> > trademark on the name at a later date.
>
> NAI ;) But, could WIkipedia be trademark at all as it is generic term?
Noone
> can trademark "Cherry Jam" as a name for cherry jam, could anyone
trademark
> "Wikipedia" as a name for a Wiki encyclopedia?

Is it a generic term?  Coca-cola is fanciful term created by combining
two generic terms, coca and cola. Wikipedia is not a word.   "wiki" is,
I understand, a foreign term meaning "quick" in English. pedia is part
of a word. They are combined to form the fanciful "Wikipedia".

As well, the term Wikipedia has been used in the media not to refer to
a wiki encyclopedia, but to refer to THE wiki encyclopedia, Wikipedia.
There is a well documented use of the word as having its origin on/
through Nupedia (another trademark).  This is not a legal opinion,
but it appears that Wikipedia has a strong mark that has been created
by longstanding and continous usage. If one puts the word Wikipedia
into any search engine one receives hits that refer to wikipedia.org,
not any other online encylopedia (even other online encyclopedias
have articles about Wikipedia).

Using news.google.com today I was informed that there are 55 current news
articles that use the word "wikipedia".  Not one of these sites uses
Wikipedia in any other way besides meaning "the Wikipedia"
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&edition=us&q=Wikipedia&btnG=Search+News

While google also brings up 2,370,000 hits for google, it seems that
even other wiki sites see "Wikipedia" as a term that refers to all the
online free encyclopedias that are located at the domain wikipedia.org.

It appears there is a strong argument that the name Wikipedia
is a fanciful name that is not a word or concept, but a designator
of Wikipedia that has a well establish use "in commerce" (that
is a legal term of art and has little to do with selling anything)
as a fanciful name and mark.

Alex756