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I am curious about something. Telepresence is a big Cisco brand. Is there any risk of trademark infringement? It is in a related domain, communication over video that is a component of anybots.

I am somewhat ignorant about trademark, but thought I would mention it.

Really cool robot. It looked great on video.

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The term being used in this way predates Cisco, so I think they'd have trouble enforcing it, especially outside a very narrow use of it.

Here's the 1980 paper where Marvin Minsky coins and explains the term (four years before Cisco was founded, and long before their Telepresence brand): http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Telepresence.html

Can you trademark a word from the dictionary? I don't think you can.

Apple? Yahoo?

You can, and probably 99% of trademarked brands are dictionary words, but not when the word means generically what your product does and you try to use just that word as your mark. You can't trademark "Computer", but you can trademark "Apple Computer" or "Dell Computer", etc.

Telepresence is a recently made-up word, so it's plausible that one could register it as a mark...but defending the mark would be difficult.

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