[sheff]

This sort of thing is happening increasingly frequently. I really like the idea of AskPatents ( http://patents.stackexchange.com ).

It seems to me that as developers we need a similar site where people can start objecting to overly broad trademarks, especially single word ones which are targeted at web service and application name related trademark classes.

There are probably much fewer trademarks issued that patents, and they are easily searchable online, eg the UK Trademark Journal is at http://www.ipo.gov.uk/t-tmj/tm-journals/2014-006/index.html .

A trademark is also much easier to object to than a patent ( http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/tm/t-other/t-object/t-afterpub/t... ).

It would be a great weekend project for someone to create a web app which does some of this. You could even charge businesses a fee to monitor words that may affect their businesses.