Either this was an invalid ruling or I don't understand trademark law.^0 A trademark is generic "when it no longer identifies a particular manufacturer or source of a product."^1 No one's using "Y Combinator" to refer, for example, to 500 Startups.
The other thing that pops up is that the company is reusing an existing term. This obviously can't be just "a word or phrase that already exists"; "Apple" is trademarked.^2 "Y combinator" the CS concept is certainly in the computing realm, but it's very different from a company. Is "technology and computing" one category that you can't reuse terms? Could you not, for example, make a rope company named "Overhand", because that's a type of knot?
Or would you have to call your company "Overhand Ropes"? I admit to being puzzled.
[0] Preemptive snark: my money's on the latter also.
The post is shockingly editorial: "Regardless of the ultimate outcome, this trademark dispute is just another embarrassment for a firm that continues to look less like the “Harvard of venture capital” and more like an elaborate and mismanaged funnel for acqui-hires."
I'm not sure what that has to do with an attempt to get a trademark, but it certainly seems like the author has some strong, if unrelated, opinions.
Seriously, it's pretty strongly worded. Also: big suprise, some startups fail, and some succeed. Much like Harvard graduates.
In the news of the trademark, it is the name of a programming idea after all. It's also a very good name of a company given that "It takes a single argument, which is a function that isn't recursive. It returns a version of the function which is recursive."
And Apple's a fruit. I don't really see how applying "YCombinator" to a startup accelerator is generic – did anyone else ever mention the phrase in that context before pg?
(Also, the guy who's bizarrely anti-YC runs a site called YC Universe? All sorts of confusing.)
The other thing that pops up is that the company is reusing an existing term. This obviously can't be just "a word or phrase that already exists"; "Apple" is trademarked.^2 "Y combinator" the CS concept is certainly in the computing realm, but it's very different from a company. Is "technology and computing" one category that you can't reuse terms? Could you not, for example, make a rope company named "Overhand", because that's a type of knot?
Or would you have to call your company "Overhand Ropes"? I admit to being puzzled.
[0] Preemptive snark: my money's on the latter also.
[1] From http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/generic-tradem...
[2] https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/...