Please explain an inconsistency?

I know nothing about law, so maybe this isn't an inconsistency at all.

Every year, the staff and other people explain what copyright means: that you can write about wizards, and a school of magic and an evil wizard trying to take over the world... you just can't write about people going to Hogwarts, or Voldemort taking over the world... because the individual general ideas (a school of magic, etc) can't be copyrighted...

So I *guess* NaNoWriMo can't do anything about all the other writing months that have sprung up.

That said, this year there's been a lot of talk of how NaNoWriMo is a trademark, and companies and such have lost their trademarks because of not protecting them, so a 'brand' name is now a generic term for something, like 'I'll just go google that', so NaNoWriMo can't allow things and have to bring in lawyers and such to show they are protecting their trademark.

Why then, do the following exist, unchallenged?

JulNoWriMo
AugNoWriMo
JanNoWriMo

...there are more, but I've never done them, so I don't know about them.

If NaNoWriMo is so gung-ho about protecting their trademark, then these names should not exist; after all, Novel Writing Month is part of the name, and hence the trademark.

I believe it comes down towhat they have trademarked.

They have NaNoWriMo trademarked, but no Wrimo, Nano, and things like that. I believe it has been said that we can have Nano or Wrimo on something, but not NaNoWriMo.

Wrimo is just a term that people use as a shorter version of the site, it's not an official trademarked term. (Same with plot bunnies, traveling shovel of death and Nanoer, nano, etc.)

Like you can refer to WalMart as Wally World but Walmart does not own the rights to that. (As far as I know.) But someone else can call their store CharlieMart because the form of the name isn't trademarked, just the actual name.

Therefore, there can be the Ipod Nano and all those other things because Nano by itself is a technical term for a type of electronic, but you can't call something else an Ipod Nano.

No other site can use the term NaNoWriMo. They can't call their site NaNoWriMoDecember because NaNoWriMo is trademarked.

Hope this clarifies things a bit.

Hmm... I guess that makes sense.