They've essentially done that and won, so.... Yeah?

There was a smallish apple producer (the fruit) that used a red apple with a bite taken out that lost the right to their logo. More recently there was another recipee startup with a pear logo that apple sued

What a broken system. The new blasphemies of the modern age are corporations overstretching into ownership of words representing things older than the language itself.

At least Google had the decency to invent a word (itself a derivative of a word invented by a child).

In the UK the cloud IaaS vendor Skyscape was forced to change name by a certain media company for only part of their name, in an unrelated field.

How about if you want to protect a trademark you don't use a word with real world meaning? What benefit does it give society to give these protections to extant words?

Also Microsoft OneDrive used to be known as Microsoft Skydrive and the same company objected.

Wouldn't be so bad if Sky had contributed anything useful to the world in the last twenty years.

Less sport on TV? Actually I do follow F1 through the Channel 4 highlights, but last weekend it was all live from Silverstone. I realised my life is too short for hours and hours (and hours) of coverage. The highlights are perfect. Sorry Sky.

They also sued polish company a.pl a few years ago because they said it sounds like 'apple' when you read it in english (.pl being of course polish TLD and it is read very differently than 'apple'). Not sure how this was resolved but the site is still up