Google
in an Alphabet soup !!
Sundar
Pichai, was recently announced as the next CEO of Google as part of the company’s
announcement that it will transition into a holding company called
Alphabet Inc.
Larry Page, the
co-founder of Google Inc., the American multinational company, announced on
August 11, 2015, creation of a new parent company, Alphabet Inc. through a blog
post. This basically means that Alphabet will be the parent company to Calico, Google
Ventures, Google Capital, Life Sciences, Google X, Google
Fiber, and Nest Labs including Google, Inc. itself.
However, the word Alphabet
is very common and used by various companies in the United States. A global
brand database search revealed that there are several trademark registrations
all over the world for the name/mark ALPHABET
and variations thereof including trade mark registrations owned by Bayerische
Motoren Werke Aktiengesellschaft (BMW) in countries such as United States,
Australia, Canada, Singapore, Mexico, New Zealand, India etc. Details of the
BMW Group registrations for the trade mark ALPHABET
and variations thereof in India are given below:
Other
applications/registrations for the mark ALPHABET
in various classes:
As per the news reports,
the German car maker that owns the trade mark Alphabet is reviewing whether
Google has committed trade mark infringement. However, the spokeswoman said
that currently there are no plans of taking legal action against Google. In order
to establish a case of trademark infringement, BMW Group would have to show
that the use of the company name Alphabet by Google creates a "likelihood
of association/confusion" among consumers between the two brands. However,
this would be proved if both the brands offered similar goods and services,
whereas it is not so.
However, Mr. Larry Page,
Google co-founder and CEO of the new Alphabet, has made it clear in the
announcement that they do not intend to use Alphabet as their brand name and
only as the name of their parent company under which all other companies would
function independently and develop their own brand identity. Therefore, a legal
dispute is not very likely to occur.
According to Mr. Page,
the reason behind adoption of the name/ mark ALPHABET was that the alphabet represents language, one of
humanity's most important innovations, and is the "core of how we index"
in a Google Internet search.
Domain
<abc.xyz>
Moreover, as the domain
<alphabet.com> has already been registered and is being used by the BMW
Group, Google acquired a unique domain <abc.xyz> for its parent company. The
rights to <abc.xyz> were bought from Mark Monitor which registered the
address in March 2014. The top level domain .xyz used by Alphabet’s website was
recently introduced in the year 2014 by Mr. Daniel Negari, who is ICANN’s
youngest registry operator.
Since Google acquired the
domain <abc.xyz>, the registrations on the “.xyz” domain have increased
by more than 27, 000 according to the website ntldstats.com.
However, reportedly BMW
does not have any plans to sell the domain <alphabet.com> to Google.
No comments:
Post a Comment