Sunday, March 27, 2011

Who owns "T" and "L"? What can TLT Group do?

TLT=Teaching, Learning, and Technology
Should I be worrying about a lawsuit from Sesame Street?      After all, who has claim to the alphabet?

Do critics of traditional grading systems have a new weapon? Can they get the Electric Company or Webster's dictionary to sue schools, colleges, and universities that still use letter grades?

We decided not to try to own "TLT" when we launched the TLT Group in 1998.

We're pleased when someone asks our permission to name something "TLT" or "TLTR," - we've almost always said "yes." We're almost as pleased when we discover someone has done so without asking.

But now I'm getting worried because I just read "When tech companies engage in legal squabbles about who gets to use our everyday words, what are ordinary speakers of the language to make of it all?"
"Facebook has been notorious in this regard, filing trademarks on an array of common four-letter words: like, 'wall,' 'poke' and, naturally, 'face' and 'book.' " - from The Great Language Land Grab - NYTimes.com by Ben Zimmer, NY Times 3/26/2011

Can you recommend a lawyer who can help us get the letters "T" and "L"? Should we limit our demands to those two letters and hope that our parsimony (only needing two letters for our three letter name) will increase our "appeal" (heh heh)? Or should we go all the way and grab "group" and "g," "r," "o," "u," and "p"?

Thanks for your help.
Steve Gilbert, P*******t
T*e T**ch*ng, L****ing, a*d **chno**gy Gr*up

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