Re: Second list of suggestions for Debian 3.0r3
Don Armstrong wrote:
> 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]
It has also some good aspects, as the SCO case shows.
> 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/
According to german law, trademarks come into existence either by
registration or by use (registration without use in the next IIRC
5 years renders the registration invalid). Worse, the trademark
owner is _required_ to defend his trademark against illegitimate
use, otherwise he'll lose it.
So you can expect there are not many trademarks which aren't
actually used, and you can expect those in use will be defended.
I don't know if Playmedia Systems actually uses "winamp" as a
trademark in Germany (of that, they would have to distribute some
product under this name).
IANAL,
Thiemo
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