It is the two-thousand-year old word for “road”, and an English preposition.

Anyone who picked it as a trademark for anything knew what they were getting themselves into.

That's not how trademark law works though. Just because apples are a common, 20 million year old fruit doesn't mean Apple can't trademark the brand Apple in relation to computers and personal electronics.

Trademarks matter in context a lot. An Apple branded computer is a lot stronger than an Apple branded apple.

They choose a brand name bordering on descriptive. If it's descriptive, ie "Great Computer Co.", it's pretty weak. It'll be tough to own "Via" for anything in transportation.

That would be like owning the trademark "General Electric" and selling electrical equipment...

Well, General Electric predates many of the Supreme Court rulings that establish American trademark law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Supreme_...

International Business Machines

General Electric

General Motors

Advanced Micro Devices

To be fair, all were among the first companies to make the thing they are named for.

... which is why you never see any other companies with "electric" or "electronics" in their name.

What a funny example to pick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer.

Apple got sued for basically exactly that because another company already had that trademark!

There's a lot of things called Via, including a rail company

This is way too close. I was sure this was a google project. Hopefully google will sue them for using a trademarked name too close to theirs.

Or would you like to try my new credit card makers, MasterCarte (ooh, that's probably already real ;-)), Vesa and MasterChief.

Well, there's CreditOne for credit cards, which uses a very similar symbol as CapitalOne. I don't know the legal status of that one...

Ironically you can take Via to the Waymo offices.

When I saw the headline I honestly thought Waymo had bought Via