Russian Businessman Tries to Patent ;-)
A Russian business tycoon has trademarked the winky smiley or emoticon. Yeah, you heard right. Sigh. Oleg Teterin, the president of mobile advertising company Superfone, has trademarked the popular ;-) emoticon.
Aside from being a successful businessman, a considerable amount of people have branded Teterin either a moron or a dumbass opportunist. While the Superfone president has no intention of suing you or me for using ;-) to make money, he’s all set to sue companies who are trying to make money off of his emoticon.
"I want to highlight that this is only directed at corporations, companies that are trying to make a profit without the permission of the trademark holder. Legal use will be possible after buying an annual license from us. It won’t cost that much—tens of thousands of dollars," he said in comments to NTV.
So, now that you’re all panicking, (okay, maybe you’re not, but we kind of are) breathe easy, it’s not happening. We’re not ones to use smilies in articles but we’d like to be able to if we the mood took us. Anyway, it looks like Teterin isn’t about to charge “tens of thousands” for an annual license to use his trademarked emoticon anytime soon.
RT reports that Russia’s patent authority has put its foot down. Woo!
“Russia’s patent authority, Rospatent, has ruled that the smiley graphic cannot be registered as a trademark. This means that firms are free to use the graphic symbol as part of their brand names, but nobody can claim exclusive rights to its use.”
Now that the emoticon scare is over, we’re realizing how little we used them in the first place. Always the way; don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. ;-)
Read more at the DailyMail.
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looks like its time for me to go and patent every remaining emoticon and sue for millions every time someone uses one. And while im at it, I'll patent that air stuff too...
Well, I'm going to patent patents.
How can people be so stupid ?
Can't you see that his only intention was to get free publicity.
Ironic, that the emoticon cannot be trademarked/patented, but the Smiley Face, the original "emoticon", was trademarked (though I don't know if it was in Russia).
By the way has anyone trademarked-patented this yet: ( . )( . ) ? (really, it's just eyes, what did you think it was?) It probably isn't even spaced out right in the non-mono-spaced font used by these comments.
The title of this article is misleading. A Patent and a Trademark are two different things. It should read "Russian Businessman Tries to Trademark ;-)"
I just figured it all out. I would bet that this Tycoon is behind the brains to EA's DRM. The root files it installs is actually a monitoring service that watches for when you now type
or :-( and whenever you do your bank account is automatically withdrawl $1 each time. Dammit I just lost 2 more bucks to EA. Curse you Spore :0 ...now it's 3 bucks.
Re "“Russia’s patent authority, Rospatent, has ruled that the smiley graphic cannot be registered as a trademark." - that's wrong. RUPTO did granted him the trademark - see PDF of the registered mark here:
http://russianpatentsblog.patentsf [...] demarking/
- the mark IS registered, and Teterin only has to pay registration fee to get the certificate.
Re "“Russia’s patent authority, Rospatent, has ruled that the smiley graphic cannot be registered as a trademark." - that's wrong. RUPTO did granted him the trademark - see PDF of the registered mark here:http://russianpatentsblog.patentsf [...] demarking/- the mark IS registered, and Teterin only has to pay registration fee to get the certificate.
If the above is correct, where the heck did the author Jane McEntegart get her info??
She must have had a visit from the news fairy, what else?!
I'm pretty sure it's already a part of Americana pop culture. That's like trying to copyright the original Happy Birthday song. Get real, man.
Actually, I invented music and dancing. So if you do either Imma sue you. I can't prove it, and everyone (including AOL) was doing it before I was...but still, it's completely my idea.
We just patented AIR (not limited to but including NITROGEN and OXYGEN)...so pay up all you breathers ! We also invented SCO, who invented Linux.
Sincerely,
Rambus