Re: [OT] Harassment of open source developer !
On Wed, Jul 04, 2001 at 07:26:07PM -0400, Antonio Rodriguez wrote:
> It seems to me that from certain perspective it is plain ridiculous that a
> group of humans can claim a word, group of words or phrase as theri personal
> or corporate property. The laws may support it, but the it does not deny its
> stupidity, nor the blindness of the fact.
The idea is really to avoid product confusion. In principle, if anyone
could call their automobiles "Ferrari", then I could sell rebuilt Yugos
under the name "Ferrari Speedster" and it would damage the selling power of
the real Ferrari's reputation.
Another point raised on the list: you can't patent "Illustrator", which is
why Adobe trademarked it.
Another point: since "Illustrator" is a good description of the activity
being performed by the product, it's probably not a defensible trademark.
(Note: I'm not a lawyer, and am giving no one legal advice.) By law, you
can't trademark a description of the product -- for instance, no one can
trademark "soap" and refuse to let anyone else say their product contains
soap. However, to defend this legal point would require way more money than
it's presumably worth to the KIllustrator developers, since they aren't
getting paid and Adobe has a huge budget for this stuff.
--
Carl Fink carlf@dm.net
Manager, Dueling Modems Computer Forum
<http://dm.net>
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