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ePortfolio trademarked?

Not sure what this means but it seems that the University of Iowa has trademarked the term ePortfolio™. On their website they claim to have built the first eportfolio in 1996. I don't know if that is true or not but the following statement is certain to raise some interest and concern:

The College of Education designed the first ePortfolio™ in 1996 and The University of Iowa now holds the trademarks for the following terms: ePortfolio™, Digital BackPack™ and Cyber ToolBox™.
Now, as you can see the term ePortfolio in this instance has an italic red 'e' at the front. I am not sure if this is part of the trademark's definition or they have trademarked the word eportfolio. Some more information would be useful. At first glance, and without any further information, it seems quite worrying to me that someone would be doing this. The term digital backpack is one that I have heard quite often too. The other trademarked terms there do not seem to have colours/italics etc associated with them. ePortfolio is a generic term that is often used to describe an array of functionality and applications. A lot of time and effort has been spent in this area and I am wondering what the implications of this are for those who rely very heavily on the term. I wonder if this will finally stop me switching between the spellings eportfolio, ePortfolio and e-portfolio?