Re: Metadata a Trademark?

[Giles S Martin <ulgsm@dewey.newcastle.edu.au>]

A question and a comment:

(1) Who (i.e., which organisation) is claiming "METADATA" as a trade 
mark?  (It can't be the Metadata Coalition, since on their home page 
<http://www.metadata.org/welcome.html> they don't claim it as a trade 
mark). 

(2) You can register ordinary English words as trade marks, but that doesn't 
stop them being used as ordinary English words.  For example, "Apple" is 
owned as a trade mark by several different organisations, but that 
doesn't stop me describing apples as "apples", or indeed describing the 
apples that I might grow and/or sell as "apples".  Although I couldn't 
find "metadata" in a dictionary, I would offer as evidence that it has 
become an ordinary English word the fact that HotBot 
<http://www.hotbot.com/> has found the word in more than 29,000 Web pages!

Giles

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On Thu, 6 Mar 1997, Baker, Graham wrote:

> The BLM has received a lawyer's letter informing us that that METADATA
> as
> applied to computer programs is a registered u.s. trademark (#
> 1,409,260).
> 
> They inform  us that "your organization has published a number of
> documents on the Internet in which our clients's registed trademark
> METADATA has been misused. Our client has no objection to your use of
> two
> separate consecutive words "meta data" or even the hyphenated
> "meta-data"
> to describe data about data. However the single unhyphenated term
> METADATA is a registered trademark which belongs exclusively to our
> client."