Chip maker cocks snook at Apple with IPAD family
Capitalising the brand?
You have to admire chip maker STMicroelectronics' cojones - or boggle at the company's seeming stupidity. It is promoting the word 'iPad' as both an acronym and a trademark.
You'll note that, in the sentence above, we use Apple's capitalisation, and that's the way World+Dog writes it too. Not STMicro, which capitalises the lot: 'IPAD'.
Presumably, it hopes we'll read and speak it letter by letter, as we would with, say, 'HDMI', 'USB' and 'CPU'. Apple, on the other hand, expects us to say the first letter then treat the remaining three as a word in its own right.
Incidentally, this is is how Reg Hardware treats capitalisation, borrowing the tradition established by the Oxford English Dictionary. If the abbreviation is read or spoken as a word, we only captalise the first character.
Examples include 'Ram' and 'Rom'. 'CD' is capitalised because, like the earlier examples, you say it out loud - or in your head - as discrete letters. 'CD-Rom' neatly mixes the two notion.
There are exceptions: 'RIM', for 'Research in Motion', is a case in point. We tend to write this as 'Rim', because that's how we all say it - only a few, odd souls say are-eye-emm. But a number of readers don't like this approach, preferring 'RIM', even though it is still spoken and read as a word, because they are either used to seeing it that way in print, or because they feel it mocks their favoured smartphone platform.
But we digress. Back to STMicro, which defines IPAD, as opposed to iPad - but not 'Ipad', which looks ugly in sans serif text, and is ambiguous: is that a capital 'i' or a lower-case 'l'? - as an "Integrated Passive and Active Device".
Trademark law in most nations that have one allows multiple use of protected words, provided each case can't be mistaken for the other. No one is (hopefully) going to misunderstand a reference to a Ford Focus as a pointer to Focus magazine, for instance.
The devices STMicro is referring to are chips, but that may prove too close a relationship for Apple's aggressively protective trademark lawyers, especially when STMicro accompanies its discussion of the IPAD with a picture of a gadget, as you can see above, that looks a lot like an iPhone with some PhotoShopped additions.
The chips "reduce parts count and simplify the design of reliable, high-speed data circuits commonly used in smartphones, tablets and mobile computers", STMicro claims.
Apple, of course, had to deal with the fact that another company, Fujitsu, held the name 'iPad' among its roster of trademarks for a gadget released in 2002. Apple eventually acquired the trademark from Fujitsu, for an undisclosed sum.
Will it strike a similar deal with STMicro? Or is a 'cease and desist' letter in the post even as we speak?
Incidentally, the US Patents and Trademarks Office lists STMicro as the owner of two IPAD trademarks, but marked as "abandoned". It has also trademarked - as of 2001 - 'IPAD' in Europe. ®
COMMENTS
This is the first time I have ever seen...
RAM written as Ram or ROM written as Rom.
Ram and Rom are quite simply wrong in my view. Either they are acronyms, in which case they should be uniformly capitalised (RAM / ROM), or they are simple words, in which case - since they are not proper nouns - they should not be capitalised at all (ram / rom).
Capitalisation has nothing what-so-ever to do with pronunciation. Pronunciation of acronym's is a question of convenience/personal aesthetic.
To wit: SQL, which some prefer to pronounce as "Ess-Que-Ell" whilst others prefer "sequel", but however you choose to *say* it, it is *written* simply as SQL, not sql, and not Sql (unless as part of some product name with arbitrarily chosen capitalisations for aesthetic/trade mark protection reasons).
LASER, RADAR etc are odd cases because those have become words - they have a dual existence. They are acronyms that have become synonymous with homophonic and homographic words that are NOT acronyms.
In exactly the same way that "hoover" has become synonymous with "vacuum cleaner" - but we don't capitalise "Hoover" when used as a generic reference to a vacuum cleaner, only when used as a proper noun, to refer to the company (or dam or former US president) of that name.
RIM shot
"But a number of readers don't like this approach, preferring 'RIM', even though it is still spoken and read as a word, because they are either used to seeing it that way in print, or because they feel it mocks their favoured smartphone platform."
...or because it's the correct way of representing it, given that it's an acronym ? I'm not aware of any rule that says you can't try and pronounce an ancronym - indeed it's often the fact that they facilitate vocal recounting that drives their construction.
You _could_ choose you own way of doing things of course, and ignore what most of the rest of the universe does, nothing wrong with that at all - no no - but in this case it just comes across as a rather juvenile "Yeah i'm different - look at me, man - all edgy and different and cool n'that"... at least to my mind.
Oh yes - and you don't tend to use Rim instead of RIM anyway, do you ?... even in those stories whose title has 'Rim' in it.
Good for STMicroelectronics - we need someone to challenge the corporate bullies
If Jobs could have his way he would stick 'i' in front of every word in the Oxford dictionary and claim every damn word for himself with the exception of a few that wouldn't look good in his Walled Garden.
Jobs is a serial plagiariser having stolen many of the names he claims as his from others, including the name 'apple'.
As for capitilisation I still prefer the 'old' way REME, BA, RIM, etc. Reading the BBC (not Bbc) web site is irritating as all the familiar letter groupings have changed. At least my spell checker gets them right, now!
RADAR?
"...or because it's the correct way of representing it, given that it's an acronym ? I'm not aware of any rule that says you can't try and pronounce an ancronym - indeed it's often the fact that they facilitate vocal recounting that drives their construction."
Yes, you mean like LASER, RADAR, SONAR, etc.? Oh, wait...
If I remember right, acronym means a shortened form of a phrase, spoken as a word, and RIM pronounced R-I-M (as I do, actually), would be an initialism.
But carry on...
RIM
Pronounced as in the edge of something why not?
but to quote Arnold in Red Dwarf -
"Well when you call me Rimmer you always put the emphasis on Rim... makes me sound like a toilet cleaner"
