Babies Named After A Brand
from the not-a-good-idea dept
You may remember during the dot com boom, the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) offered parents money to name their babies IUMA, and some actually took them up on the offer. A year later, a married couple tried to auction their baby's name off to major corporations on eBay. Last year, Acclaim entertainment offered $10,000 to anyone willing to legally change their name to that of a video game character. It seems these companies are going the wrong route by paying parents to name their kids after certain brands. Many parents are naming their kids after brands for free - sometimes causing distress in the family. The mother of one of six American boys named Timberland, claims she wanted to call the boy Kevin, but her (since divorced) husband insisted the boy be called Timberland or Reebok. The article names plenty of other unfortunately named children, who are going to have hell to pay in school. There's a Gouda, a Bologna, a Xerox and apparently Camry is an increasingly popular boys name. Please, please, please do not name your child Techdirt.
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No Subject Given
I don't know .... TechDirt for a kid ... not bad. I'm thinking boy, graduated (because the school had to), wearing a mullet hair cut well into his 50s.
Oh yeah. Imaginery works great.
Not dissing you Mike, for whatever reason, the name really works for many of my southern relatives. :-)
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Outrage
How Outrageous ? We cannot allow ourselves to be sucked in by these crass comercial practises. We need a new law to regulate this.
Jokes aside, can the parents be sued for naming their kid "Nike", if Nike did not
want their trademark to be used as a baby-name ?
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Re: Outrage
As I finished reading this item, my eye caught the headline of the next item, only I read it as "Maybe Parents aren't Such a Hot Idea".
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Nike Royalties
Keep in mind "Nike" isn't exactly original, but taken from a GreeK (or was it Roman) god of victory.
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No Subject Given
Please, please, please do not name your child Techdirt.
How about treating the "i" as a variable and using Techd1rt for the first-born, Techd2rt for the next, and so on.
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in Hong Kong, the name thing takes on a whole new dimension.
popular names here include kleenex, durex, denon, and gucci
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Re: Nike Royalties
It's actually a Greek GodDESS, so I would hope that "Nike" is a girl. But yeah, maybe original trademarks could get away with suing but names such as Nike and Reebok and such can't sue because that would be pretty much like Britney Spears suing a Joe Spears for naming his kid "britney."
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Raw Data
Playboy had a breakdown of these corporate names given to children in one of thier issues under their Raw Data section. Xerox, Pepsi, and Hennesey were my favorites.
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