Date: Sun, 15 Feb 1998 19:06:16 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>, A Joseph Koshy <koshy@india.hp.com> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, jkh@FreeBSD.ORG, cjs@portal.ca Subject: Re: General policy on trademark violations Message-ID: <19980215190616.44412@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <199802150758.XAA01524@dingo.cdrom.com>; from Mike Smith on Sat, Feb 14, 1998 at 11:58:19PM -0800 References: <199802150744.XAA22883@palrel1.hp.com> <199802150758.XAA01524@dingo.cdrom.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Sat, 14 February 1998 at 23:58:19 -0800, Mike Smith wrote: >>>>>> "Mike Smith" <mike@smith.net.au> writes >> FreeBSD folks, you are seeing just the tip of the iceberg. Did you know >> that *a huge number* words and phrases in the english language have been >> trademarked or servicemarked on way or the other in the US? Large companies >> in the US spend tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars in trademark searches. > > Fortunately, you appear not to quite have grasped the way that > contemporary trademark law works. In addition to the name matching, > the *category* has to match too. That would be nice. Remember the first edition of CFBSD: Triton is not a trade mark of Intel Corporation. It is a trade mark of some other company which, to the best of my knowledge, has nothing to do with computers. Unfortunately, an overly zealous German lawyer has taken to suing people who use this name to refer to the chipset. Sheesh. In fact, the name was only similar, and it was trademarked in a completely different area. Of course, that's in Germany, and trademark law differs a lot from one country to another (in fact, the trademark owner was in the Netherlands). > If I own the trademark "grep", for my brand of unique fractal-pattern > rubber gloves, I am not in a situation where the grep(1) utility's name > conflicts. If I own the service mark "NCR Control" for my cash > register repair business, likewise. Not quite, although there is a car hire company called UNIX Rent in Germany. They can get away with it because UNIX was never registered world-wide. On the other hand, Tandem owns the trademark NonStop, and found that in some Nordic country they have a beer which uses "non-stop" as an advertising gimmick. Tandem didn't press the issue, especially since the brewery was a customer, but both sides took the issue seriously, and not just because Tandem was a well-known beer-drinking company. > There aren't too many consumer products whose category space conflicts > with FreeBSD. Games are one of the few, and we can happily live > without them. I think you're completely off track on this one. Greg To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19980215190616.44412>