Two-A said:
The copyright laws need some serious revision. You can't just claim ownage of a part of the english language, or any language, period.
This has nothing to do with copyright law. A quick refresher: there are 3 major kinds of intellectual property law regarding public works (thus excluding trade secrets).
Patents: These protect functional works and discovers for a limited amount of time, but require that the work be disclosed to the public so it can be used elsewhere once the patent expires. These last 20 years in the US.
Trade Marks: These protect the marks and names used to identify distinct businesses and products to help consumers by avoiding confusion. A trade mark remains active as long as it is used, but it's scope of protection can vary widely depending on how well known the mark is and how unique it is. A trade mark is ALWAYS allowed to be used when showing a product as itself in the media. Trade marks cannot include anything functional.
Copyright: These protect creative works for a limited time that is far far too long and the Supreme Court has ruled can be extended and for new corporate works extends for over a century while works made by a person are protected for Life + 70 years. Copyright can never cover functional components of a work as such an invention is never protected by copyright. However a specific piece of code can be as it is considered a literary work. Thus a computer game, which is functional, is protected by copyright law.
However for generic games without a plot you could still legally recreate a game with the exact same mechanics because copyright can't protect these and original artwork as long as you coded it yourself and your code was inherently different from the original and created without you reverse engineering it.
So once again, the major issues with copyright law have nothing to do with this trademark issue. While it is clear that copyright law is all kinds of messed up right now, trademark law is still mostly sound as the Internet really hasn't done much to change the dynamics of trademarks. If anything it has made them work better as unique trademarks lend themselves Internet searches.
