"Gregory Morrow" >
wrote in ink.net:

> Obviously the name "Cadillac" is not a copyrighted brand name,
> correct?

It's a family name in France:

Charles Laumet dit Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac
Huteau de Cadillac

Cadillac is a town in the Bordeaux region where they produce a white
wine bearing the name Cadillac. It is suggested by locals that
Charles Laumet was not born in Cadillac but he borrowed the name from
another family. On the whole, Charles Laumet's reputation was
tarnished in France because of a disagreement with the Jesuits as to
the management of the colony, where he favoured miscegenation and the
Jesuits opposed it. Upon his return to France, he was arrested,
presumably to force him to turn over his possessions of mines in the
Louisiane to the Crown.

A similar thing happened to François Bigot, the last intendant at
Québec. Although he never failed to supply troops during the Seven
Years War and sometimes resorted to paying them directly from his
personal purse due to cash shortages, he was arrested upon his return
to France and forced to turn over 2/3 of his sizeable fortune to the
Crown (a sum of 1 million livres), or be imprisoned under a new law
that forbade officials from deriving personal profit from their
appointments. The law was passed *after* he had returned to France,
but applied to his situation which was antecedent, obviously aimed at
divesting him of this fortune.

Bigot, disgusted, moved to Switzerland and never set foot in France
again.

--

German to Picasso in front of Guernica: Did you do this?
Picasso to German in front of Guernica: No, it was you.