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Comment by sreenadh | Hacker News Reader

I ALWAYS had a feeling that something was off about "JavaScript". I hope Oracle does not decide to start suing everyone using JS like node.js...

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Oracle knows how to use the legal system to obtain money. It's one of their core competencies. If you know the history of Oracle, you know that's not sarcasm, it's just an observation. If they're not doing it now, it's because they (correctly) realize there's no chance they could make money with it, and I don't see that changing in the future. If they actually tried to sue someone for it, "JavaScript" would change to "ECMAScript" at the speed of "Find & Replace".

can you suggest any further reading on oracles legal prowess in this regard? sounds like an interesting read to me, but I'm unsure where to find it.

Here's a start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_v._Google

http://arstechnica.com/series/series-oracle-v-google/

Well, good luck trying to enforce it... It's now a generic term for ECMAScript.

Strictly speaking, JavaScript is an implementation of ECMAScript, not merely a generic term.

IANAL, but it will depend on whether JavaScript is used by members of the public to refer to ECMAScript that isn't JavaScript (that's a mouthful).

In other words, I can call a fountain pen a biro and that shows that the trademark has become generic, it doesn't matter that I'm technically wrong.

This is how it works in Commonwealth jurisdictions anyway, haven't checked US law for about a year.

It's the same. The issue is actual usage, not whatever meaning is correct.

People generally bring up kleenex and xerox as the examples of trademarks lost to generic use (and someone upthread mentioned band-aid), but I think a more interesting example is coke. There are large regions of the US where "coke" is the general term for soda, so that the following invented example wouldn't raise eyebrows:

    A: Want a coke?
    B: Yes, a 7-up please.

(Or at least, it wouldn't raise eyebrows for the implication that a 7-up is a kind of coke.)

How is Coca-Cola dealing with this? Do they have a policy or a strategy?

JS is arguably a different trademark entirely from JavaScript.

I wondered about that. I would prefer it if we all started calling it JS (as many do), and pretended it stood for -- the language. Though I suppose we'd keep having to say "the language formerly known as JavaScript" in many contexts.

I also like the JS logo and its variations. I'm assuming Oracle could lay no claim to that . . .

A lot of JS developers call it "ECMAScript" these days. A lot more frequently than, say, ten years ago.

Mostly this is because we no longer care about JavaScript version numbers (I facepalmed when I saw a dropdown in JetBrains' WebStorm IDE that offered various "JavaScript 1.x" options as the language environment). Instead we only care about "ES 3", "ES 5" (i.e. ECMAScript 5.1) and "ES 6" (which frequently also refers to ES 7 and beyond). At the same time I see less and less references to "Harmony", probably because the spec that came out of it is now openly using a real version number.

Of course the irony here is that what people often think of as "JS" these days is not actually Mozilla's JavaScript implementation but that of V8, as used in Chrome, node.js and other places (probably because V8 is relatively painless to embed).

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