23/01/2014
You don’t own the sky, SKY!
This Christmas, we got a rather unusual present from the good folks at British Sky Broadcasting Group plc, British Sky Broadcasting Limited, SKY IP International Limited and Sky International AG. It would save us a good page of lawyer-gibberish to not explain exactly how these companies are connected. Suffice to say it is a corporate structure set up for tax-avoidance, but that’s a different story.
As it turns out, SKY owns the word “sky”. And not just the word. They claim that anything starting with the “sky” prefix is theirs. Such as SkyDrive (by Microsoft) and Skype. And SkyLib, which makes us sad. Strange then, that they would bother to register trademarks for “SKY NEWS” and “SKY SPORTS” separately, but you can never be too safe, right?
SKY has never used the word "skylib", nor registered it as a trademark. Their whole case rests on the likelihood of confusion between SKY and SkyLib. We believe it is extremely unlikely that anyone would think the collaborative consumption service SkyLib is affiliated with the Evil Empire SKY. But then again, SKY has an army of corporate lawyers, paid to make the unlikely seem obvious.
Today, we were warned that SKY wants us to discontinue our use of the skylib mark within two weeks. And if not, “be prepared that SKY will defend and enforce its rights to the full extent of the law”.
What do you think? Should we change the name of the service? Ignore them? Challenge them in court? Start a campaign to fix trademark law?