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Metadata® is the name of a US corporation and a registered trademark in the United States.In the early summer of 1969, Jack E. Myers coined the term “metadata” and first used it in print in a 1973 product brochure. He intentionally designed it to be a term with no particular meaning. A data and publication search at that time did not discover any prior use either of the word “metadata” or “meta data”. The word Metadata® was registered in 1986 as a trademark (U.S. Trademark Registration No. 1,409,206) belonging to The Metadata Company. The trademark was granted “incontestable” status in 1991. Metadata is a proprietary mark which stands for The Metadata Company.
The Metadata Company has attempted to threaten people legally into not using the word “metadata” in the generic sense. Many people believe that due to the widespread use of the word “metadata” in the generic sense as “data about data”, it is likely that the “Metadata” trademark has entered the public domain by becoming a general term. This was the legal opinion expressed by the Office of the Solicitor of the United States Department of the Interior to the Federal Geographic Data Committee when the latter was threatened by Metadata’s lawyers for its use of the word “metadata” in a generic sense. However, no judge has as yet ruled the trademark invalid.
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