Trademarks and Namespaces

In an age where billions of people as well as businesses can interact at the speed of light, names are becoming less and less unique. This is creating a problem for businesses that are required by trademark laws to create names that do not conflict. In the past, people where separated by space and time which created a natural barrier protecting trademark and name confusion. But, as the world shrinks through the use of technology, these barriers are disintegrating and things are starting to get messy.

Take the case of Bill Wyman. He is a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and he recently received a cease-and-desist letter telling him that he could no longer use his given name. Why? Because Bill Wyman, band member for the Rolling Stones, says that using the same name is creating confusion for his brand [Slashdot]. Well, it may be creating confusion, but does that give anyone the right to tell Mr. Wyman that he can't use his given name?

Another case that went to the Supreme Court this week concerns the lingerie store Victor's Little Secret. The claim is that this name is too similar to the name of the large initmate-apparel company, Victoria's Secret [The Christian Science Monitor]. The Court has yet to decide on this case, but their decision is an important one because it will set a precedent for how name conflicts will be treated in the future.

This problem is well recognized in Computer Science circles and it centers on a concept called "namespaces." A namespace allows the same name to be used for more than one thing. This is accomplished by isolating the use of a name to a specific context. For example, if we have an object called Person and another object called Business, we might use the name "head" to specify some aspect of each of them. However, the meaning and use of that name will be very different depending on which context we are referring to. For instance, "head" might specify the hat size of the Person and it might refer to the CEO or president of the Business. In any case, the same name is used, but its meaning remains completely different. By isolating the interpretation of a name to its particular context, programmers are permitted to reuse names over and over again. It would be impossible to write complex software applications if every name had to be completely unique and so namespaces are an indispensible part of computer programming.

We have a similar problem arising in modern society. The natural boundaries that created namespaces before have been eroded to the point where few now remain. Fifty years ago, there was rarely any confusion caused by two people having the same first and last name. But now that all of our personal information is shared in large databases, we find that a person's name doesn't even come close to uniquely identifying them. For instance, if you do a search on Google, you will find information on hundreds if not thousands of individuals with my same first and last name [Google]. However, you would be lucky to figure out which one is me.

The courts are now faced with the challenge of figuring out how to deal with the problem of unique names in a world where that ideal has become impossible. The real solution is likely to have many characteristics in common with namespaces in Computer Science. In other words, there needs to be some mechanism that insulates the use of a name to a particular context. In order to avoid confusion, new ways of uniquely identifying businesses, trademarks and individuals may be required. The alternative is to force businesses and people to create increasingly obscure names in order to maintain the status quo.