Is "Stainless Steel" a Copyrighted Name?

I looked at your thread, and it's hard to say. It depends on what the meaning of "is' is. To quote a popular President.

NO!!! It is not.

The term stainless steel has become a common term. Anybody can use it.

If you don't believe me, research the name, Aspirin.

Lawyers getting hungry?

I don't think that it could be a "copyright". I think your question would be about a "registered trademark". I have seen the words "stainless steel" thousands of times over the years and I don't recall ever seeing the (R) symbol after it.

I don't know if anyone ever tried to trademark it, but after decades of no trademark enforcement I doubt that the trademark (if it ever existed) would still be valid.

If no one disputes my "registered trademark" idea then find the US office where people register trademarks. That might not answer if it is still valid but you should be able to find out if it ever was a trademark.

What valid sounding arguments are people making in favor of the term "stainless steel" being a protected term?

What term(s) are people suggesting you should use in place of "stainless steel"?

Is there a valid issue or threat that has forced you to deal with this or do you just have people that need to create work in order to avoid being laid off?

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and I never played one on TV. I was only on TV for about 10 seconds and I was not a lawyer.

Somebody is attempting to buy themselves some time. Bingo!

It's really "corrosion resistant" steel. Stainless is a misnomer.

Yes but Stainless Steel rolls off the tongue better.

WALOOB!
Do nothing and the problem (maybe even the Director, if you are lucky) will go away.
I expect he's getting paid good money, and this is the sort of nonsense he's promulgating...what a waste of time and money.
Never mind I expect he'll get a big bonus at the end of the year.
Try saying "Who will rid me of this turbulent Director" a similar ploy worked for Henry II
If politics won't let you ignore it, just nod, grin, say 'yes dear' and do the minimum to cover your backside.
Del

You're right. A few good examples of that:

Samuel Morse had a patent on the telegraph but he didn't maintain due dilligence in enforcing his patents and pretty soon all kinds of telegraph companies were springing up and Morse couldn't do anything about as soon as he started stopped pursuing all of them.

Bell Telephone learned from the example Morse made and stayed on top of their patent for the telephone for the full duration of 25 years. Then only the rich and big business had telephones. As soon as the patent expired, other companies were able to jump in and made the telephone available to everybody.

Standard Oil did a pretty good job enforcing their patent on crude oil and its products. Until Oil was discovered in Texas and it was too difficult for Standard to enforce the patents on them and next thing you know we have Texaco.

Some of you may not know this but in 1935 somebody got the bright idea of copyrighting the song "Happy Birthday". That copyright ran out and now Time-Warner has the copyright and gets $2 million/yr on royalties. You're not allowed to sing Happy Birthday in public where a large group of people can hear you, if Time-Warner finds out they will take you to court.

Does not matter if it ever was or not LJ. When you copyright or trademark something you must actively seek out and enforce copyright/trademark infringements or you lose the rights to it. since "Stainless Steel" has been in common usage for hell, probably over 100 years I suspect, then there is NO WAY that any copyright or trademark infringement can POSSIBLY be pursued.

It appears that the Chief Engineers are hapless victims of the legal department, as well as we underlings faced with designing things that are tort proof and safe from sharks with law degrees. It's a precautionary caveat, that's all.

Apparently some legal beagle in some law firm issued the proclamation that we are not supposed to use trademarked names such as stainless steel for the specification of generic materials. The consensus is that SST is not trademarked but decision makers tend to err on the side of caution.

BTW, the official abbreviation for Stainless Steel is "SST" per ASME.

Go Figure!

Thanks for the chat and the jokes. I'm signing off

Laughing Jaguar and for good reason!

I think if you looked into it to see if there is an active trademark or copyright on Stainless Steel name and find that there isn't one, you can file a new claim to the name and enforce your copyrights to it and that will be valid until you drop the ball on it.

And would the 'copyright' also cover, eg, "acciaio inossidabile", "acier inoxydable", "Edelstahl", "acero inoxidable", "roestvrij staal", "rostfritt stål", "stali nierdzewnej", „нержавеющая сталь", "ruostumaton teräs", etc, etc?

Apparently there has been a couple of patents for stainless steel. Feel free to research it, or have one of your page boys do the foot work. I get side tracked every time I start researching through the patent office.

Yes there are the ASTM gives a window of nickel % to be classed SST. other lower % of alloy compounding materials wont affect the rating so as they develop new blends they can be patented so long as they can prove 10% min difference or that it has a special property. For example I found a knife maker using a type of stainless that has a extremely high thermal stability originally used for turbines but worked great for hunting/skinning knifes. hard to grind nearly impossible to forge difficult to heat treat but WOW what an edge. I'm not a learned person just perpetually curios ( typically to my wifes frustration )

this is what I have read let me know if I understood incorrectly .

Also not lawyer mine speek to goodly fo dem.

I's done oopsed tis cromium not nickel I dono witch side farted datun out

so sorry, just had a sanity break, feeling much better now thanks.

Who would that knife make be? I'd like one of those...

A patent for Stainless Steel was applied for by the company that first discovered how to make it, Firth Vickers, one of the workers there discovered a piece of steel lying about in the yard that hadn't rusted, even though it had been lying around for a couple of years, Firth Vickers lab folk then analysed it and found that it had small amounts of both nickel and chrome it it, they then experimented with it and even applied for a patent, that was in the early 1900s. My grandfather who worked there told me about it!

Tort proof?!? (re:#12, mostly). That kind of thinking is one of the most stifling stultifying, retrograde and asinine attitude. Nothing, but not any single thing ever get improved, ney, changed in any way under the Sun under such a regime. And the darned tort still occurs. These lawyers are blinkered like a plowhorse, and having the head in the sand outside their narrow specialties.

Did I get a steam up with these perennial obstructionists? Yep! All their litany is negative, negative, negative, did I say negative? Not a blessed thing constructive.

To illustrate with the first example coming to my mind. Car engines (autos for the rest of the world) started out in the late medieval times, with magneto ignition. It is crappy allaround, cannot be made modern. Car ignition went thru at least 5 revolutions since. The result is the highly reliable ignition (in cars that is) today. Small airplanes are still stuck with magnetos, bad as they are. People installed modern ones, and got sued out of existence.

You go along with them, and you will be protected right into obsolescence and out of existence with their advice.

I wonder, how Apple and Microsoft handled such a dilemma? Maybe, maybe they were too big to bite into, unpunished?? Having nothing to do with merits?? Nah, that could not be, iustice must prevail!

It is rent seeking, if I ever saw one.

It looks like you need to change legal teams, or at least find one that is headed up by a Patent Attorney. These are the only people I know who call themselves "lawyers" who are worthy of the breath they draw.

Dang it! I was wanting to get back here sooner, but I got sidetracked back there in the Patent Office, what a muddled mess it is!

9.10.11

You can't go to the market and buy

5kgs of vegetables: It has got to be potatos, pumpkins, radish, whatever.

10 kgs of fish: It has got to be cod,carp, mackerel, sardine, whatever.

1000 kgs of stainless steel: You have to specify the grade precisely.

This is a forum for engineers, for God's sake, not the House of Lords. The Director was probably rubbing in the importance of unambiguos, precise specifications. There is no insanity here. In fact, not having clarity in specs can lead to a lot of confusion and create fertile ground for lawyers later on.

Vinay Isloorkar, Pune, India

Bravo Vinay!!

Engineering without precision and specificity is an oxymoron of monumental proportions!

Lawyers, however, whether elected to public office or chasing ambulences, are an unacknowleged pandemic and a plague upon America and developing nations.

Judging from the age of Shakespear's famous quote on getting rid of them, modern civilizations are myopic and thus fighting the wrong enemy.

I hate painting one group with so broad a brush. It's patently unfair, especially when we remember that Ghandi was himself a laywer. In this case however, I do so without guilt.

Laughing Jaguar

Any director who demands that an engineering team specify what precise kind of stainless steel they are talking about when they are designing specifications is not only doing her job, but should get a bonus. There are so many alloys called "stainless steel" that no prediction about performance can be made simply using that name. If you cannot predict performance, then why do they pay you?

It is a term suited for the marketing department. Not the engineering department, and therefore does not belong on a blue print. Therefore it becomes a legitimate point to wonder if the very term itself might actually mean something, and mean something to somebody. What if somebody HAD registered that misleading name? Maybe we can..."we" being the organization the director belongs to. Would there be any point to doing so? I don't think so, but somebody, somewhere, is tasked with knowing the answers to those questions.

Since it is not a valid or particularly useful engineering term, your team is right to be told not to use the term for any application other than aesthetic. The question of possible infringement on registered trade marks or whatever is, in my opinion, a valid question, one I shall ponder as I fry my eggs this morning in a Teflon frying pan, and eat it off my Corian counter top, and wipe off the spills with a bit of Kleenex.

That's right. We use 304, 316 and 416 T-Brite.

Primarily we use 304 and the 316 only comes in when we call out shaft. The 416 T-Brite we use for cosmetic purposes.

We were looking into using 208 in place of 304 because it is lower in nickel so the price doesn't fluctuate so much but it's too hard to get in my region, we'd have to special order it and order several thousand pounds at once.

Which is why the 200 series is not often specified/used. it is a chicken/egg situation, nobody stocks it because nobody uses it, nobody uses it because nobody stocks it....lather rinse repeat....

Yes. Apparently it's available on the East Coast but not on the West Coast. I don't see why not. It has practically all the same handling characteristics of 304 and is slightly stronger than 304. But we don't have it on the West Coast. Not all the 200 series is compatable. I don't have the sheet in front of me but I think it was 208.

It isn't stocked on the gulf coast because it is not as corrosion resistant in the oilfield environment. That nickel is needed in our industry. In fact 304 is not used as much as 316 is for that reason. 316 in many sectors of the oilfield industry is considered "lowest common denominator" material with nowhere to go but up in corrosion resistance.

Yes I know. For marine exposure you want to go with 316 and I think it's SL316 is what you want to use.