I don’t know if this is more or less ridiculous than Marvel claiming sole ownership of “super hero.” At least they had a hand in, if not creating from scratch, at least popularizing the term. But Futuremark, while an established company in an area where pwnage is rampant, has neither pwned anybody (ever) or even been in a situation where pwning was an option.
And let’s be frank here: “pwn” isn’t even a damn word, it’s a popular misspelling of an overused scrap of trash talk, which will probably be obsolete soon as everyone moves to voice chat. Trying to make it a trademark is not only misugided, it’s pointless. Face it, Futuremark, it was a n00b move.
Law: pwnage (TM)? [Kotaku]
Just a minor quibble: Marvel *and* DC co-own the “super hero” TM. IANAL, but I’m pretty sure that the space is important. As for case sensitivity, that I don’t know.
As for the argument that it’s not even a real word, well…
Integra?
Altima?
Camry?
Pretty sure none of them are real words, but I’ll bet they’re all trademarked.
Heck, one could argue that because it isn’t a real word is the reason why you *should* trademark it.
Thanks for keeping me honest, John, I’ve corrected that. Why did I think it was just Marvel?
And of course, the wordsmithing argument is a complicated one, but in this case I think it’s more weird because “pwn” is an emergent word, not a focus-group-tested word made for a specific product. It’d be like Band-Aid trying to trademark “ow.”
Well, it’d make more sense to try to TM an emergent word rather than one that is in common usage, since it’d be hard to claim ownership of a common word, right?
You can trademark a common word: Apple, Windows, etc. You can’t CONTROL the word and you DON’T OWN THE WORD. You only own use in commerce to sell a product.
Apple (computer) can’t stop the grocery story from selling apples (the fruit), but could stop an “AppL” knock-off computer manufacturer.
Same here. They can TM “pwnd” all they want, but they can’t do anything about people yelling that they pwnd each other. All they can do is stop other companies from selling “Pwnd Brand ___” where “___” is whatever kind of product.
…which will probably be obsolete soon as everyone moves to voice chat.
You’d be surprised by how many people actually say “pwned” out loud — it is not limited to typed language.