It's not easy choosing a name for your new product. You
brainstorm, collect possibilities, consider the pros and cons,
sweat it out, and finally pick a mark. Then you open the paper and
find that a new group using your carefully-chosen name is taking
over large portions of a foreign country, summarily killing
prisoners, and imposing strict religious law. All of a sudden, you
find that you're not that hungry for breakfast.
This won't happen to most trademark owners, of course, but
it did happen to AT&T,
Verizon, and T-Mobile, which rolled out a joint venture offering a
mobile payment service called ISIS.
They did what they could do – they undoubtedly searched
carefully to try to make sure they wouldn't encounter problems
with other marks. They filed applications to register ISIS and
ISIS-related marks – 46 of them, according to the Patent and
Trademark Office's database, starting around February 2010.
Many of those applications have now become registrations.
