Wednesday

A COMPUTER MOUSE WITH A MIGHTY EXPENSIVE NAME

I wonder what the telephone conversations are like. When Apple's legal folks talk to the legal folks at CBS. About Mighty Mouse. A mighty mouse. Computer mouse that is.
Apple and CBS live or die on the strength of their intellectual property. Each is well known for vigorously enforcing their rights to intangibles. Each has squadrons of lawyers.

So how is it that a small Maryland company has( I suspect) mousetrapped Apple and CBS ? From a distance it seems that Apple and CBS forgot some basic lessons of trademark adoption and licensing. And so somebody is ( I suspect) going to pay a small company a rather large sum of money.
CBS owns the Mighty Mouse character. And rights to the likeness and name for certain collateral items. But rights in the term mighty mouse for a computer mouse? Nowhere to be found.
One must assume that when Apple decided to call its new computer mouse MIGHTY MOUSE they conducted a comprehensive trademark search. So how come they didn't find the other company and its MIGHTY MOUSE ? And why did Apple decide that they needed a license from CBS? CBS had never used the term mighty mouse on a computer mouse. And the US Trademark Office had already announced that the term MIGHTY MOUSE was not entitled to a very broad scope of protection.
And what of CBS? Did they know of the Maryland company in 2007 when they filed an application to federally register the term MIGHTY MOUSE for a computer mouse? And what accounts for the very puzzling statements they made in their application? Statements that the lawyer for the Maryland company jumped on when he filed an action to oppose the CBS trademark application.
With the enormous popularity of the Apple MIGHTY MOUSE mouse, I doubt that Apple wants to change the name of the product. So a small company in Maryland should be feasting on some very expensive cheese.