Who owns the sky?

Here's an article that made me ponder how far the ownership of brands has come in respect of the words within those brands. Simply having the word sky in their skydrive product name means Microsoft have infringed on BSkyB's ownership of the BSkyB name. Perhaps if Microsoft had called it BSkyBDrive it might be a clearer decision!!!

Microsoft has backed down from its brawl with BSkyB over the trademark of the Sky name.

The US firm released a cloud storage service named SkyDrive in 2007, for which user numbers have since grown to more than 250 million. However, BSkyB claimed the name was infringing on its copyright and wanted Microsoft to be forced to change it.

The broadcasting company took its complaint to the European Union and, after the case was heard in a UK court, a ruling was made that Microsoft would have to change the name.

It had threatened to appeal the decision, but on 31 July the two companies announced they had come to a settlement, which would give Microsoft “a reasonable period of time to allow for an orderly transition to a new brand”.

Taken from an article in CW