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A comment on Oracle Will Not Voluntarily Withdraw JavaScript Trademark. Parent comment

Re:Oracle Will Not Voluntarily Withdraw JavaScript Trademark by mananaysiempre on Tuesday January 07, 2025 @09:29PM (#42630248)
(Not a lawyer.) To have rights to a trademark, you have to use it in, well, trade. It’s not enough for a term to refer to a specific thing in normal usage, you must have a widely recognized claim on that thing. It should be in the customer’s interest that your thing not be confusable with thing-alikes that others may offer, specifically by having an exclusive right to be sold as the thing. And Oracle demonstrably does not deal in “JavaScript” any more than many many other companies and individuals do.
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Re:Oracle Will Not Voluntarily Withdraw JavaScript Trademark by arllk on Tuesday January 07, 2025 @09:42PM (#42630323)
The only JavaScript offering from Oracle that I know of is GraalVM[0]. It's funny though - they use "JavaScript" and "ECMAScript" interchangeably in their docs. They call it "A high-performance embeddable JavaScript runtime for Java" but then tout it as "ECMAScript Compliant", basically acknowledging that JavaScript is defined by ECMAScript specs and the terms mean the same thing.

[0] https://www.graalvm.org/javascript/

(Not a lawyer, just a nerd observing terminology)

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Re:Oracle Will Not Voluntarily Withdraw JavaScript Trademark by fsckboy on Tuesday January 07, 2025 @11:57PM (#42631084)
not sure if this is why they do it, but trademark law requires you to have a generic name for your product. "Kleenex brand facial tissue"

not having and using a generic name creates the danger of people attaching your trademarked name as the generic and you might lose your trademark.

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Re:Oracle Will Not Voluntarily Withdraw JavaScript Trademark by giancarlostoro on Tuesday January 07, 2025 @11:19PM (#42630862)
Them calling it ECMAScript in some instances means that it follows the actual ECMA spec for ECMAScript (what everyone calls JavaScript historically). Them calling it JavaScript implies it could be their flavor, or something like Node and not necessarily strictly ECMAScript, at least that'd be the reason I'd use it interchangeably.
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Re:Oracle Will Not Voluntarily Withdraw JavaScript Trademark by mbreese on Tuesday January 07, 2025 @09:40PM (#42630309)
(Also not a lawyer)

This is why I think Deno has a solid chance here. Sun may have filed for the trademark, but it’s not clear to me how much it has been used by Oracle. I also think this is why this step is likely the beginning of litigation, not the end. With Oracle not voluntarily withdrawing the trademark, it allows the rest of the process to invalidate the trademark to begin.

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Re:Oracle Will Not Voluntarily Withdraw JavaScript Trademark by nicoburns on Tuesday January 07, 2025 @10:04PM (#42630449)
Not only that, but other company's not-technically-javascript products are widely known as JavaScript. And have been for close to 3 decades now (Microsoft's JScript was released in 1996)
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Re:Oracle Will Not Voluntarily Withdraw JavaScript Trademark by jongjong on Tuesday January 07, 2025 @10:15PM (#42630512)
Haha yeah, in my experience, they use less JavaScript than most tech companies out there.

Their image is very enterprisey, so Java, C... You don't think of JavaScript when you think of Oracle.

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Re:Oracle Will Not Voluntarily Withdraw JavaScript Trademark by wodenokoto on Wednesday January 08, 2025 @04:26AM (#42632470)
Oracle has a pretty strong claim on Java, and JavaScript was named after Java explicitly to piggy-back on the that names recognition and success.

It’s bit like saying McDonald’s shouldn’t have trademark claims on “McDonald’s carbonara” because they don’t deal in Italian cuisine (that much)

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Re:Oracle Will Not Voluntarily Withdraw JavaScript Trademark by foolswisdom on Wednesday January 08, 2025 @01:42PM (#42637151)
The relationship between those two things is more like the relationship between burgers and fries, two things that some people may think belong together, but having a claim on one surely has connection to having a claim on the other.
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Re:Oracle Will Not Voluntarily Withdraw JavaScript Trademark by extraduder_ire on Wednesday January 08, 2025 @04:32PM (#42638675)
Or like saying McDonald's shouldn't have a trademark on "Big Mac" outside of beef burgers, because they don't regularly deal in "Big Macs" made out of chicken.
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