Loose Connection

Bill “Pushes to Talk” Just A Little Too Hard

by Bill Price, N3AVY

Okay, so a lot of you make fun of me because I have pet rats. I’ll bet if I took a survey, more pet rat owners are happier with their choices than spouses of “wireless communication executives.”

So I hear via the grapevine (which might have been copyrighted in the words to a song but so far hasn’t been registered as a trademark, to my knowledge) that “PTT” and “Push to Talk” (for which it stands, indivisible, one nation, etc.) has become a MARCA REGISTRADA, or ERIK ESTRADA, or some pair of words (like the bearded Smith Brothers, Trade and Mark, that we of the “Push-to-talk” brigade no longer own.

I hear that, for the time being, we are still allowed to do it (that is, we may “press” to talk) through the gracious goodwill of Nextel™, so long as we refer to it as “Jell-O Brand Gelatin Desert” or Kleenex-Brand Facial Tissues,” but soon we’ll be warned not to use “PTT™” generically so as not to destroy its trademark value. Oh, I can see the lawyer-letters spewing forth already. At least the postal service will benefit from this folly.

This does not seem to have come from a lack of use, such as the frequencies within the 220-MHz band, where the commercial entities were quick to spot unused and underused ham and other non-commercial radio frequencies. Not hardly. No, we’ve been pushing and talking and PTTing, and P-ing-to-T, and every variation known to mankind, including the hands-free VOX (which gave birth to the ubiquitous “Uh…”) for a long time now.

As far as I know, we have been taking diagonal shortcuts across real estate acronyms owned by virtually everyone in the “contact-making” business, whether it be push-to-talk, pull-to-talk, squeeze-to-talk, grimace-to-talk, or any number of little digital, or even bodily, functions enabling our two-way communicators to do their “thing.” We have taken claim to these paths by eminent domain long ago, much the same as amplifiers “pushed-and-pulled” and operated “class-A,” or “class-B,” or even “class AB.”
So before I even get into how stupid this is, suppose I were to rush in to the USPTO (yes, I can spell patent and trademark office) and register the term, “On”? You know…the “On” part of an On/Off switch? Besides being just plain arrogant, how would it strike you as users of such devices? Would it apply to faucets too?

“Sorry, mom, can’t turn the water on to take a bath, Bill owns that position now. You’ll have to get his permission before you can make me take a bath!”

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