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Over on The Fishbowl, Charles Miller writes On Trademarks.

Many years ago I worked for a doco company called 'Hard Copy' when the trash-news TV show of the same name started ... a lawyer told us not to send a threatening letter unless we were really committed to actually sueing them. In the end anyway because of the changing nature of what the business was doing (usability and that sort of thing) we changed our name (it turned out, the TV program didn't even last that long anyway).

It did result for a while though getting the most interesting phone calls - "I've got the scoop on the corrupt police and the marijuana plantion" type of phone call; we'd be all like "Oh, please continue," until the boss told us to stop that sort of thing and refer them to Channel 10 (or whoever my faulty memory won't recall properly it was). We did once get a video tape of the "199?2/3? Air Guitar World Championships" in Jupiter's Casino. I found that video tape last weekend cleaning out an old cupboard full of junk.

Although, when Charles says "But language moves slower, and has much greater lock-in than consumer preference." Although I suppose that consumer preference is very fickle, I'm not sure whether language does change that glacially. I mean, Google is hardly old hat and it's already a common verb and look how fast Kath-And-Kim linguistic artifacts ("welcome mat" and plenty of others) have entered the Australian lexicon (and before that, Barry Humphries penned stuff like "map of tassie", "technicolour yawn", "siphon the python" etc).