And if the case really was Sky versus Sony, it becomes much less of a ‘big guy using the little guy around’.
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Well I’m just going to deny that blue area in my game overhead is a representation of a sky. And Sky TV might consider suing all those people of eastern European origin with surnames that end in ski or sky. Ski no more, it’s now called 2-footed wheel-less skateboarding on snow. They’ll need to hire a linguist to investigate all the uses of sky in the human language. Can’t have anyone interfering with Sky TV’s right to sue for profit rather than creating new entertainment that people might actually want to watch.
well the sky’s the limit
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I think you are missing the point of the game… 
Why does that matter? Why should Sony be any less allowed to use the word “sky” than I am? (Note that the case with MS was quite different.)
Also, consider that big companies pushing each other around can still end up setting precedents that might apply to us later.
You miss the joke (sky TV is the limit lol)
Thankfully they got past that one 
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We are really dealing with two separate questions here.
The first is should a common word like Sky be allowed to be trademarked. I’m generally in the no camp on this on. Trademarking common words is a bad idea.
The second question is given an existing trademark, should companies be allowed to enforce it. On this I say yes.
Based on the first one then someone should be seeking to overturn the trademark on sky. It wouldn’t be the first time that a company has re branded because their trademark is not enforceable. But as long as they have a trademark, I can’t fault them for enforcing it.
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Sky is not a distinctive name for a trademark. It won’t hold up to scrutiny of a competent and honest judge. Sky TV is a distinctive name. Microsoft is a distinctive name. SkyDrive is a distinctive name, well sort of. I used to live on Skylake Drive, but whatever. There must be a particular font and logo associated with the Sky TV trademark that they filed at the same time to get that trademark granted and so Sky TV should expect their lawsuits to only have validity when someone is copying their Sky TV logo and Sky TV font to misrepresent the infringing business as Sky TV.
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As someone already pointed out, “sky” is not trademarked, “Sky TV” is trademarked (probably along with a bunch of other related marks). So that brings everything back to the one question, which is about how it’s being enforced.
In what way is the mark “Sky TV” (or a related mark) being protected or defended by limiting use of the word “sky” in another mark, “No Man’s Sky”? Unfortunately we don’t know.
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Time to pull up some actual facts?
According to the UK intellectual property office, the word Sky is trade marked. There are about 141 registered marks using the word Sky on its own. Searching for Sky in combination with other words causes the search engine to complain that it cannot return more then 1000 results from a single search. Sky has been registered in so many different colours and patterns that any random use of the word sky probably looks close to one of them.
If you check out the No Man’s Sky registered trademark, you can see that some of the categories applied for overlap with the areas Sky Broadcasting is involved in. The original categories are quite broad.
If you want to go one step further you can log onto the European Union Intellectual Property Office website and check out the actual details of the opposition yourself. From my brief reading it amounts to something like this.
Hello Games: We want to register ‘No Man’s Sky’ for pretty much everything. Web sites, TV shows, Merchandise, Books, Magazines, Computer Software, give us the whole works.
Sky plc: Hang on a second, we use the word Sky for a lot of those things as well. Especially the TV shows!
Hello Games: Fine, we’ll just use it to publish Science Fiction video games, and print off some T-Shirts and have a website
Sky plc: That is reasonable, go ahead
Sure this doesn’t give us an insight into what went on behind closed doors between lawyers, we only get to see the final results of the case. But it really does look like Sky plc was simply establishing boundaries to allow the two trade marks to coexist. The original trade mark application would have allowed Hello Games to establish a broadcasting network under the name ‘No Man’s Sky’, that could directly compete with Sky TV. And that would definitely cause consumer confusion.
So despite the pain and the lawyers fees, this one looks like the system did its job properly.
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Ah, right.
However we dress it up, though, it’s still someone telling someone else how they can use the word “sky”.
First of all, would it? Secondly, acknowledging that this goes back to your point about getting a trademark and enforcing it being different matters, why should it be anyone else’s problem that Sky chose to use a single common word for their branding?
Of course that’s not specific to this case. The “solution” (if it is indeed one) would be to stop people from being able to trademark a single, common word, because of course that is going to lead to things just like this. (I actually thought it was already the case that you couldn’t, hence my incorrect assumption above.)
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They shouldn’t. I took his comments though as simply saying that if that’s the case then this isn’t a David vs. Goliath story.
Yes
That’s an interesting question. Sky certainly thought it might produce confusion. And confusion is a problem for the consumer. Remember trade mark law is designed to protect the consumer, not the companies. Say ‘No man’s sky’ does start up a pay TV channel. Then my poor grandmother decides to sign up to Sky TV to watch English murder mysteries. Instead she gets random sci-fi stuff that she has no interest in.
I may have misread the trade mark page. I’m not actually sure if Sky TV has a registered trade mark on the word sky. Its unlikely such a trade mark would be able to be registered. I haven’t looked through all of the 141 trade marks on the website, but the ones I did look at were all associated with a specific logo or image. There appear to be hundreds of other UK companies that use the term sky in their name, so Sky TV probably doesn’t have the word registered.
What Sky does have is
- 141 trade marks on various logos and images using the word sky
- Very strong consumer brand awareness
- Trade marks on many brands that include the word sky
Together these form an unregistered trade mark on the word sky. And unregistered trademarks are still legally protected, even if they are not as strong as registered trademarks.
alternate reality where they lose:
no man’s space
would seems fitting
I had a quick look and found one trademark on the word “SKY” that didn’t appear to be associated with a logo, though I also could have misread or misunderstood something. I don’t think it was one associated with Sky TV, but it was enough to debunk that part of what I’d said in any case.
If Hello named their TV channel “No Man’s Sky TV” then surely that’d be infringement on the “Sky TV” trademark because they would be using it, whole and verbatim, as a part of their own name? So that combination of words was out of bounds anyway. It’s also reasonable to expect that others leave the conjunctive form “Sky [thing]” alone, because that’s at least a little distinct from the word “sky” on its own and it’s a format they’ve been using for some time.
But just how far should we have to change things before it’s ok to use the word ‘sky’ in a name? Taken as a whole “No Man’s Sky” is already reasonably distinct from just “Sky”, isn’t it?
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I think any use of sky in a brand in TV or broadcasting is probably off limits. That at least is what Sky TV is trying to establish.
A TV show based on the game is not the same as an entire TV channel much less a general telecommunications company that also provides internet access; so again, we still have a case in which Sky TV filed a lawsuit against an entirely different entity, and one which had a name that was vastly different than “Sky TV” anyway. Imagine if the BBC were to file a lawsuit against any game / potential TV show that uses the letters B and C.
But the bottom line for me is: how do the rest of us avoid a similar lawsuit if the mere act of using one commonplace word somewhere in the title can get you sued?
UK is known to be a favorable hotspot for liable and slander type lawsuits which I personally think is a good thing but the judicial branch is going to have to have their greedy hands slapped and cuffed in many cases. Interpreting the law to be favorable to the business interests that have those judges in their back pockets is not allowed anymore than the legislative branch is allowed to create laws and then execute and judge those laws themselves.
Don’t avoid them but represent yourself if sued since we are talking monetary damages the average person doesn’t have. It’s not like you are calling your game Sky TV by Microsoft. And then use the fact you’ve been sued to educate yourself enough and represent yourself to counter-sue for damages since you, I, and everybody else knows that such lawsuits are illegal anti-competitive drivel and the suing company/ies need to be punished for wasting the people’s limited resources on such things. You stand a much better change of walking away with millions that way than with an app or game anyway; not that that’s your goal; your goal is to use the language fairly and on equal terms as those with staff lawyers looking to intimidate the entertainment competition into redrawing from a fair shot at life. So keep the blue sky, fictional television stations, and story telling in your games and tell Sky to get lost.
Then they’d get sued by Paramount (“Space, the final frontier”) and keyboard manufacturers (space key), not to mention the creator of Space Is Key series (probably most relevant one).
Seriously, copyright and trademark law is effed up, just look at the content ID bs and this case. It should be either heavily reformed (just not in the way Taylor Swift wants it) or plainly abolished (in case of TMs, abolishing use of single, common words that can be found in an ordinary dictionary, instead only trademark made-up words or unique phrases and abolish any litigation based on similarities to existing TM, only if someone is using registered TM without authorization - so I can’t sell Coca-Cola, but can sell Coke-Cole).