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Comment by jdc0589 | Hacker News Reader

If they don't have a vehicle named "Serenity" at some point we are going to have a serious problem.

It's the least they can do after that show was so rudely cancelled.

For those not in the know:

> Firefly is an American space western drama television series [...] The series is set in the year 2517, after the arrival of humans in a new star system, and follows the adventures of the renegade crew of Serenity, a "Firefly-class" spaceship.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_%28TV_series%29

I'm shocked that their lawyers even let them call their space company "Firefly". It's probably a sufficiently different field that they could win a trademark case at trial, but I'm not sure it's 100% cut-and-dry. I think naming a ship "Serenity" without securing some sort of licensing rights might be inviting trouble.

Wouldn't that require Fox to argue that they're in the space launch business to demonstrate the potential for confusion?

You shouldn't be. There are 185 trademarks for "Firefly" in the USPTO database [1]. Fox don't own any of them, but even if they did it would only apply to specific goods or services such as publishing fiction and merchandise, not launching rockets.

That said, I doubt one could call such a company "Harry Potter's Wizardly Rockets" without receiving a lawsuit, but I suspect such claims would be based on copyright.

1. http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=toc&state=4804%3A4...

Obviously. My point was that a show about a spaceship and a company that launches spaceships are close enough that you could imagine it was some kind of marketing tie-in. It's just plausible enough that it wouldn't necessarily be thrown out as absurd, and that's usually enough to scare off most startups (since going to court over it would be much more detrimental to the small startup than to 20th Century Fox).

I can imagine they'd want to tread lightly and not name one of their spaceships after a spaceship on the show Firefly.

Shiny.

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