Dell Loses Bid for 'cloud Computing' Trademark

From PC World: Dell cannot register "cloud computing" as a trademark because the term is a generic one describing services offered by many companies, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has said in an initial ruling.

In denying Dell's application, the USPTO included dozens of news stories and other material supporting its contention that cloud computing is a widely-used term of art for the technology industry.

The term refers to computing services that are delivered to end users over the Internet, often from a remote data center. It has been applied to many types of services, including storage services like Amazon's S3, online anti-spam services, and hosted applications such as Salesforce.com's customer relationship management service.

If Dell were allowed to trademark the term it could send dozens of other vendors scrambling to find an alternative buzzword to describe their services and avoid messy lawsuits. IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Yahoo and Google all have employed the term cloud computing to promote their services.

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