What was du Pont of that?

I sell stuff on eBay. It's mostly stuff we bought a while ago, own, and no longer want. Shortly after I sold an old pair of dive gloves to somebody, I got this email...

When I investigated, I found the complaint had been made by somebody at E. I. di Pont de Nemours and Company, who has nothing better to do with their time than find people using the word Kevlar in the description of a pair of old gloves with Kevlar in them, which was indicated by the use of the word Kevlar on a label attached to the gloves, and force eBay to take down the listing containing the word Kevlar.

Am I supposed to sell the gloves by saying they are "reinforced with something jolly strong whose name I can't mention"? It's not as if I was claiming to have invented Kevlar, and the manufacturer of the gloves was proud that they contained Kevlar.

Do not read this aloud. If you do, du Pont will probably claim you have made an unauthorised broadcast of their registered trade name, Kevlar.


Kevlar Kevlar Kevlar 

Update

According to a report in the Guardian, "Imagine that a small group of people coordinated the intentional manufacture and release of a lethal poison – and imagine they knew this poison had special properties that meant, once released into the world, it would be inevitable that it would make its way into the blood of virtually every person on the planet, even babies in their mother’s womb, and stay there, like a ticking time bomb.

Well, that “ticking time bomb” waiting to explode into serious, even fatal, disease is not a fictional device from some doomsday thriller; it is real, it is inside virtually all of us, right now."

Not content with bullying people for using the word "Kevlar" to describe something that contains Kevlar, du Pont has poisoned everyone in the world. The email from the lawyers whinging about this post will make interesting reading.