Re: Second list of suggestions for Debian 3.0r3
On Mon, 29 Mar 2004, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> I don't know about the situation in other countries, but at least
> with the German equivalent of a "cease and desist" (Abmahnung), a
> company owning a trademark would be allowed without any warning
> before to instruct a lawyer to send "cease and desist" letters to
> every single mirror and perhaps CD distributor in Germany. If you
> sign to desist you have to pay the costs of the lawyer which is
> usually in the range of at about 1000 Euro per letter.
This is a wierd tenent of German law and its private cease and desist
letters. I don't know of any other country that does this (and
frankly, the abuses of it in Germany lead me to hope that no one else
does this either.)[1]
Regardless, it doesn't work that way in the US, and I hope most other
countries are similarly sane.
Furthermore, it's interesting to note that Playmedia Systems doesn't
even hold a trademark on winamp (as of 2/3/2004, that was owned by
AOL). They only own ADNECTO, 4PLAY, BOP, QPQ, INTERDICT, PCAMP, PDAMP,
AMPHIBIAN, INTERDICT, MPFREE, and PLAYMEDIA.[2]
Don Armstrong
1: More importantly, I looked and was unable to find a german mark
owned by PlayMedia Systems... so I'm not sure that we need to worry
about this plane of attack.
2: According to the US Trademark database at http://www.uspto.gov/
--
This can't be happening to me. I've got tenure.
-- James Hynes _Publish and Perish_
http://www.donarmstrong.com
http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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