ANN: MobiliX - Mobile UniX Site Lost Trademark Case in Second Instance
MobiliX - Mobile UniX Site Lost Trademark Case in Second Instance
The written verdict of the appelation court was released now. Contrary to
the decision of the first court it states that Obelix and MobiliX are
"very similar". Therefore it will be likely that people take one for the
other. It doesn't matter that the suffix "ix" is used very often to name
computer related products, because the names have to be sufficient apart.
Werner Heuser owner of MobiliX (http://mobilix.org) was charged to
withdraw his trademark and the domain name. He also has to pay a
compensation fee. His lawyers Jaschinski, Biere and Brexl
(http://www.jbb.de) are currently checking whether an appelation to the
highest German court Bundesgerichtshof is possible. Until this decision
the plaintiff will not make use of the verdict.
In autumn 2001 Les Edition Albert René, the owner of the trademark
Obelix has charged Werner Heuser. He is the owner of the wellknown
open source project MobiliX. This project provides a plenty of
information about UniX operating systems like Linux, BSD and Solaris
on mobile computers. Therefore he has choosen a name, which
expresses this by a combination of the words "Mobile" and "iX".
According to the plaintiff he has choosen a word very similar to
their trademark Obelix, because he wants to take advantage of their
famous name.
A detailed documentation of the case, containing a information
about other projects under siege and the written statements of the
lawyers JBB, is available online
(http://mobilix.org/mobilix_asterix.html).
--
|=| Werner Heuser = Keplerstr. 11A = D-10589 Berlin = Germany
|=| <wehe_AT_mobilix.org> T. 0049 - (0)30 - 349 53 86
|=| http://MobiliX.org UniX on Mobile Systems: HOWTOs,Software
|=| http://Xtops.DE Laptops+PDAs pre-installed with UniX
|*| This is no time for phony rhetoric -- Lou Reed
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