@Daniel Korn: interesting sidebar to your (correct) statement that they wanted a trademarkable brand: there was a SciFi newsfeed website called syfyportal.com that was approached by a group offering to purchase the domain name for a small sum of money (a few thousand dollars). The owner of the domain sold it to them, only to find out later that they misrepresented themselves, and were in fact working for Universal, which owns SyFy. Had they been honest, the selling price would not have been so low, because of the inherent value of the SyFy brand to the network. Representatives of the network lied about their identity to scam an individual. Classy.