As the medium grew, more Internet service providers, more individuals, more schools, churches, non profit organizations, AND businesses found the Internet, and signed on. Enter the trademark lawyers. The job of a trademark lawyer is to defend his or her client's trademarks. In the United States, this means diligent monitoring of trademarked words or phrases to make sure that nobody else is using them in ways that are similar to the markholder's use. By and large, this is a job that trademark lawyers do very well.
Trademarks are very important in our world.
Sometimes they are essential to let the consumer know the true source of a product or a service. But SONY is a fairly unique name, in that it was invented to describe what its founder envisioned as a new world of electronic devices. As a result, it's quite common for a name to be trademarked by several different entities, and for those trademark owners to coexist peacefully with each other and with hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of others who use the name in different ways - as a nickname, say, or as the name of a pet. Thus, trademarks provide two kinds of protection. Here, of course, was the crux of the problem.