SlashNOT

Capt. Tako writes: British Telecom filed suit today against Logitech and Microsoft today, asserting that those companies not only violated their trademark rights to the letters “B” and “T” by releasing “various devices” that include the two letters, but also induced billions of computer users to infringe BT’s rights by creating devices that allow users to add those two letters to other trademarks.

“It’s quite clear to us that if these ‘key boards’ didn’t contain the letters “B” and “T”, then computer users wouldn’t be unknowingly including our trademarked letters in their own trademark applications. The monir inconvenience of not being able to utilize the full alphabet on a computer is no justification for infringing our strong historical rights to “B” and “T”.

Those historical roots go back pretty far. BT is an outgrowth of the original “British Telegraph” when predated the QWERTY keyboard layout, and British Telegraph is decended from the Havershirefordhamington-upon-avon fishery, which predates middle English when the letters “B” and “T” were first incorporated into English. It is this length of history which give BT’s claim merit.