The American Chemical Society is suing Google to defend its trademark SciFinder Scholar from confusion with Google Scholar. There’s a lot of worthy discussion about the problem on the CHMINF list. ACS is obviously worried about that word "Scholar" being used by Google and that Google’s millions of users might assume there is a connection. But the pundits should get real, I’m pretty sure that outside of chemistry, 99.999% of the world’s population will never have heard of the American Chemical Society let alone, SciFinder Scholar and only a fraction of those billions have even heard of Google, and of those that have, even fewer will have heard of or be even vaguely interested in Google Scholar.
Anyway, isn’t the word “scholar” a generic term relating to education in some way? Surely, it’s analogous to the word quot;cola" which comes in many flavours made by many different companies? If Google had called their academic search engine Google Scifinder, I suppose that would have been very different. The lawyers must be rubbing their hands with glee. (Incidentally, there are 29 hits when one searches PubMed with the author field "Scholar"), I wonder if I could change my name to Dr Searchengine Scholar?