From the article:

Like Turner, Cathy West is weathering Monster's glare. Her tiny MonsterVintage.com in Camas, Wash., sells vintage clothing including striped bell-bottoms and 1970s-era Grateful Dead concert shirts over the Net.

She thought someone was joking with her two years ago when she got a licensing agreement package from Monster Cable suggesting that she pay the wire-maker $1,000 a year and 1 percent of gross sales in exchange for use of the word "monster."

She threw the packet out, thinking it was junk mail. Now she has an attorney who estimates legal fees could reach $50,000 in a trademark fight.

"We don't have the money to fight this," said West, who named the company after her cat, Monster. "We tried to negotiate with them, but let me tell you, these guys are not nice characters. It's just bizarre.

"All we are doing is turning old rags into a decent way to pay the bills. I'd never even heard of Monster Cable before."

I guess the cable company is doing it because they think they can get away with it. But there are some words that are so non-unique through the vernacular that they can't be trademarked. I would think this is one of those words.

History has shown that companies like Aspirin, that made a pain reliever and analgesic, lost out big time when the company name was used to describe the product and became the common usage. That's why when you read writer's magazines, there are full-page ads from Xerox_® and Kleenex_® and John Deere_® and many others reminding writers to acknowledge their corporate ownership and not use them as general nouns.

SRS