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Can someone explain to me what the implications of this trademark could be? Would that mean that a store that sells books and would have the word Book in their logo or brand could expect a lawsuit?

I'm not that familiar with trademarks and such.



trademarks are market specific. You could be a bookstore called "whatever book" and be fine. You could not be a social network and call yourself "whatever book". The general idea is to prevent things from being associated with a brand in the consumers mind when that thing has no right to the association.


Some of the markets they're applying for seem a little questionable. Looks like they're trying to claim far more than just social network.

* Downloadable e-commerce computer software to allow users to perform electronic business transactions via a global computer and communication networks

* Magnetically encoded gift cards;

* Software for accessing and viewing text, images and electronic data relating to conferences in the field of software development;

* Software for making reservations and bookings;

* Software for ordering and/or purchasing goods and services

* Software to enable accessing, displaying, editing, linking, sharing and otherwise providing electronic media and information via the internet and communications networks


> * Software for making reservations and bookings;

The word BOOKing should be a giant flag that they're trying to trademark the generic name there. Reservation book, order book, etc all come from physical books. It would be a giant stretch to try to trademark book for software covering those things.


> * Magnetically encoded gift cards;

That'll be interesting in the UK and Ireland, at least, given the existence of National Book Tokens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Book_Tokens, https://www.nationalbooktokens.com), which I believe are magstripe-based these days.


Trademark work by classes.

Facebook is trying to register "book" for class 9 (Computer and Software Products and Electrical and Scientific Products).

The bookstore would most likely be in class 16 (Paper and Printed Material Products) and therefore won't be affected.




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