John Hasler wrote:
> Angelo writes:
>> It was reiterated by Mozilla that if it doesn't do this, it will lose
>> some ability to protect its trademarks. IANAL, but somehow it just
>> doesn't sound right to me.
>
> It needn't be right in order to be true. Trademark law is loony.
Actually, it's right, true, and not at all loony.
Think about what a trademark is: a way to tell the buyer
exactly what she's getting. If Kimberly-Clark let any old
tissue maker put `Kleenex' on their box, there wouldn't be
any purpose to the name, would there? So, K-C has to insist
the name only be used for their product, and none other. [1]
Therefore, the law simply recognizes that if things have
gotten to the point where the name no longer specifies a
particular maker's product, it has no use as a trademark,
and therefore isn't one, and the owner loses the right to
claim it as such. [2]
/Therefore/, trademark owners have to do their best to
keep such a thing from happening, which means not letting
people call random programs ``Firefox''. And, if it's Free
Software, it can easily turn into some random program, so
don't do that. Debian is just the first one to hit the
tripwire.
Of course, why Mozilla thinks it /needs/ a trademark is
another question, and one for which I can offer no answers.
If Mozilla just accepted back reasonable patches, there'd be
only One True Firefox, modulo a few lines of code here and
there. If Joe's Browser & Storm Door Company came out with
something entirely different and called it that, they'd be
laughed out of business.
Hmmmm, if it were Microsoft putting out the counterfeit,
on the other hand.... Maybe Mozilla has a point there.
--
Best wishes,
Max Hyre, who took a class in this stuff
several decades ago.
[1] Of course, they're fighting a losing battle in the
casual usage, but at least they can keep other tissue makers
at bay.
[2] Did you know `Zipper' used to be a trademark? And not
so long ago only Merriam-Webster could call a dictionary
`Webster's'?
[3] Trademark law recognizes that no one's going to mistake
a hawk for a handsaw, so two companies making those two
separate products can both call them `Hamlet' brand, with no
trademark infringement. The U.S. PTO has a whole list of
different product types to help decide which are more or
less non-conflicting:
http://tess2.uspto.gov/netahtml/manual.html
(NOTE: This is a biiiggg page: 1.2 MB, almost 2300 lines.
Unless you're morbidly curious, you probably want to load
just a bit and cancel the transfer.)
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