Kleenex has more in common with ThumbDrives than you think

It was an innocent enough mistake. I referred to USB flash drives in a recent article as "thumb drives." Then the letter from the lawyers arrived: "Our client is concerned with the inadvertent use of its mark." That mark, of course, being the term "ThumbDrive."

Who would have thunk it? Well, some maybe some would have, but not me. I mean, it's not like I was using the term kleenex -- oops, I mean Kleenex -- to describe tissue or anything as thoughtless as that. But it seems Trek 2000 International Ltd. coined the word "ThumbDrive" way back at the turn of the third millennium and they've been keeping a watchful eye on the Internet for misuse of said term ever since. A group of vendors even filed a lawsuit trying to break Trek's claim to a patent on the ThumbDrive. So this is serious stuff.

Now Trek wasn't being mean to Computerworld about the whole ThumbDrive issue. It's not like they were suing us for $10 million for not placing a "TM" sign after the term. They were simply asking us not to use “ThumbDrive” in the future unless it came in the same breath as Trek 2000. But I was still pretty shocked that someone had trademarked the term.

I mean, IBM could have trademarked the term HardDrive when they invented them 50 years ago (by the way, next month is the 50th anniversary of the hard drive -- so get your party hats on). I suppose Adam Osborne could have put a patent on the term LapTop back in 1981 when he decided PCs should be flat. But those folks didn't. The terms they used to describe products were just two words crunched together to make it easier for the rest of us users to identify technologies that are almost as generic as mother board and apple pie. By the way, I found a photo of the man who invented the laptop here. Watch, someone's going to tell me it's a fraud.

So, now I’m not sure how to feel about ThumbDrives. On one hand, I’m sure Trek put a lot of thought into the term. And, you have to admit, it’s a grabber. On the other hand, Dov Moran, over at M-Systems, invented the USB flash drive, and he didn’t trademark the term -- that I know of.