Alphabet International, owned by BMW, has made a short statement confirming that “the possibility of any trademark infringement is currently under review” following the announcement of a new Google holding company – called Alphabet.
CEO of Google Larry Page said in a blog;
“Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable. So we are creating a new company, called Alphabet (https://abc.xyz).
“Alphabet Inc. will replace Google Inc. as the publicly-traded entity and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares of Alphabet, with all of the same rights. Google will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Our two classes of shares will continue to trade on Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG.
“This new structure will allow us to keep tremendous focus on the extraordinary opportunities we have inside of Google.”
Both Larry and co-founder Sergey Brin confirmed that the name of Alphabet in part appealed to them due to its meaning as a “collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations”.
Alphabet responded immediately, saying:
“Google has founded a holding company called Alphabet. The website www.alphabet.com is owned by BMW Group, Alphabet’s parent company. The possibility of any trademark infringement is currently under review.”
As may well have been expected, the alphabet.com has been overloaded with traffic following Google’s announcement, even though Google has secured the ‘abc.xyz’ domain for its new parent company.
At this stage, whether Alphabet decides to take things further is speculation, but according to the Trademark and United States Patent Office, as long as there is no possibility of confusion, it is possible for two businesses to operate with the same trading name. However, it should be noted that Google has automotive interests with its driverless vehicle technology programme.
