I think I heard about this a while ago. I wonder what will happen. It seems kind of strange to me to attempt to claim a trademark for something that's been in public, general use for some time. However, I also recently saw that Despair, Inc. was awarded a registered trademark on the common frown emoticon (colon dash left_paren.), but this apparently happened some time ago; see for example the news at
http://despair.com/frownonthis.html. So you never know what's going to happen.