Oh knock it off, glassholes.

First it was King, the company that created Candy Crush, that tried to own the word "candy." Then Apple tried to trademark "app store." Now Google is going after an equally common English word: "glass."

To my and the rest of the world's surprise, King was successfully granted ownership of the word "candy," even though it abandoned the trademark in the U.S. a month later. Google is having less luck with "glass." The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office responded by telling Google the word "glass" can't be trademarked under federal law because it's "merely descriptive." In other words, Apple has every right to trademark the word "apple" because everyone knows Apple doesn't sell apples. Glass, however, is closely related to the Google Glass product, which creates a problem. Google isn't even the first company to go after ownership of glass. Other pending or approved glass-related trademarks by software/hardware companies include "looking glass," "iGlass," "smartglass" and "teleglass."

Google's pending trademark

King's successful trademark of the word "candy" was met with a pretty big uproar among the general public. Not only is the idea of owning such a common word pretty absurd to me, but it hurt other app develops who had created (or were creating) unrelated products that used the word "candy." King was essentially granted a monopoly over the word and had full reign to attack other smaller companies' products and pull them off the market. As if Candy Crush had any reason to feel its market share was threatened...We're talking about an app that even my mom spends countless dollars on to get mores lives.

King's, and now Google's, attempt at owning common words is a practice some people call "predatory trademarking." It's frowned upon because the winners are the giant companies that control a vast amount of the market share already, and the losers are the small players who are just trying to make a living in a cut-throat market.

I'm not an expert in trademark law, and I'm sure a lot of it comes down to complicated legal procedures with the USPTO, but I'm not sure why companies like Candy Crush and Google should be granted ownership of such common words. If other companies were trying to mimic their products and posed a real threat, that would be different. But we're talking about Google here. As if the company doesn't control enough of the world (and our lives) already.

Google is already struggling to combat its "glasshole" reputation after a bout of bad publicity brought on by some pretentious Google Glass-wearers. This latest trademark application doesn't really help Google's case. You already own half the world; why must you own the word "glass"? Let some of us common folk have a chance!