Trademark-fighting help?
Hi all,
My apologies in advance if I have no business posting here -- I was
referred to this list by someone from #freshmeat, when I explained the
problem they said you guys have some excellent legal advisors.
Hopefully, since I got some mail some time ago from Tony Mancill stating
he'd like to roll together a NeoMail debian package for inclusion into
Debian, I'm hopinh it's at least semi-on-topic. :)
I'm the author of the NeoMail webmail app. Recently, when I was
checking to see if the squatter using neomail.org was anywhere close to
losing the domain anytime soon, I ended up on a trademark search engine
site linked from registrars.com. I figured I'd see if NeoMail was
trademarked, and to my surprise a trademark is pending on "neomail,"
held by NeoPets.com, Inc. The record of the trademark application can
be seen at either of these locations:
http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=76033373
http://www.nameprotect.com/cgi-bin/FREESearch/detail.cgi?action=detail&db=PTO&detail_id=76033373
Of particular interest is the fact that the goods/services entry is
listed as "ELECTRONIC-MAIL (E-MAIL) SERVICE," which I'm sure puts my
NeoMail in direct conflict with theirs. However, their filing didn't
occur until 4/24/2000, with first use claimed at 4/6/2000. NeoMail has
been publically available under its name since 2/15/2000. I sent three
e-mails so far, once on this past weekend, to several standard contact
addresses at neopets.com, as well as their lawyer's e-mail. The second
was sent directly to their "business department" which was the closest I
could find to who should likely be looking at this issue. The last I
sent to the neopets.com domain-holder's address. I have yet to receive
a response, or even an acknowledgement that my message was at least
received and they were looking into it.
It would seem that I would be vulnerable to a trademark infringement
suit once this trademark goes through, and I want to prevent this from
happening. I don't have the time or money to spend in legal battles
over the name of a GPLed piece of software.
I plan on calling the USPTO when they're open tomorrow (they're closed
right now) to find out what the next step is to contest the trademark,
but in the meantime, I'm just wondering what the best way to handle this
is. Has anyone here gone through this process, and if so, have any
advice on how to avoid having my software's name stolen?
Thanks in advance,
Ernie Miller
--
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
http://neomail.sourceforge.net
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