Is the English language running out of words? Two lawsuits in which technology companies scrambled over one another for increasingly rare lucid trademarks suggest that this may in fact be the case. IBM faces court in France and the Netherlands over its ‘e’ logo with a distinctive swirl. A two-person IT consulting firm claims it has a prior trademark claim to the ‘e’. E Technologies Associates LLC, based in New York and Paris, says it has been using the ‘e’ since April 1997. The company applied for trademark registration on June 10, 1997 in the US. Later it sought to register the trademark in Europe as well. For its part, IBM did file a trademark application for its own version of the ‘e’, but not until August 21, 1997. E Technologies wants a permanent injunction barring IBM from using the logo, but has hinted that it may settle for $9m. There’s a brand new precedent: Microsoft Corp has succeeded in settling one of its lawsuits by paying $5m for the right to the name ‘Internet Explorer’. SyNet, a defunct internet service provider once based in northwestern Chicago, filed for US and Illinois trademarks on the name a month before Microsoft started marketing IE in 1994. Microsoft’s lawyers had argued that Internet Explorer was not a brand name but two generic words describing what web browsers do, which makes it hard to see just what they paid $5m for. What’s more, Dhiren Rana, founder of SyNet, said he declined a $75,000 offer from Microsoft in 1995. Not bad money for generic words. On the other hand, $5m may be a bargain compared to the estimated $30m it could have cost Microsoft to take the IE name off its packaging and marketing collateral. Rana claims that it was attempting to defend his trademark from Microsoft that bankrupted his company last year. Ironically enough, because of the bankruptcy, he won’t see much of the money. According to SyNet’s court-appointed trustee Neville Reid, most of the windfall has been earmarked to pay the company’s debts.
