Microsoft Live Search goes Kumo?

So someone else owns the patent?

So what? This is MS. You think something as trivial as that would stop 'em? They'd probably just use it anyway and then bury the poor guy under a mountain of lawyers if he tried to complain about it.

Besides - does anyone actually use the Microsoft search engine? Kumo, my behind... actually scrub that - it sounds dirty.

Microsoft

Yeah, they'll probably try to bury the guy under a mountain of lawyers.

Their search engine is still going to be utterly shit and used only by people with very low IQs or very little web experience.

They'd be better off wasting their time and money on making sure that the next OS they release works better than 98se2 or XP...

Trademark

The strength of the trademark is only as good as the owners ability to enforce it and prevent it from wrongfully being used within the registered domain. At the end of the day it comes down to the depth of pockets of the parties concerned. The guy would appear to be a troll, looking for a big pay off from M$.

Also, as soon as the trademark passes into general language use (as a generic verb or noun) then it ceases to be much of a trademark. Google is probably getting close to this, which they are probably not too worried about until we start using some other search engine to do our googling with.

I'm just off to kumo the interweb, for some new pocket protectors.

Mine's the one with the slogan "My other Hoover's a Dyson" on the back.