Obelix./.MobiliX: Highest German Civil Court Dismissed the Case The trademark case Obelix versus MobiliX - Linux On Mobile Computers was finally dismissed by the Bundesgerichtshof - BGH, the highest German civil court. Werner Heuser, owner of the trademark MobiliX and the domain mobilix.org - UniX On Mobile Computers, has lost the case, because the BGH rejected his request for an appeal. The BGH did not care to provide a detailed argumentation for their decision, the chamber merely quoted the appropriate part of the law.
In his long and detailed argumentation to get a permission for an appeal, Prof. Dr. Achim Kraemer, lawyer of Werner Heuser, wrote: "The commercial usage of domain names leads already at the time of their registration to preventive reactions by holders of older trademarks, which claim their trademarks as violated. Particular risks exist for so-called word-trademarks, which contain parts of the common language, when they are combined with suffixes or prefixes used in certain groups. If trademarks are protected much too excessively, as the appeal court has done in our opinion, some very famous but fancy names may occupy a wide range of the language and it becomes impossible for anyone to create new word-trademarks." In autumn 2001 Les Edition Albert Rene, the owner of the trademark Obelix had charged Werner Heuser. He is the owner of the well-known open source project MobiliX ( now TuxMobil http://tuxmobil.org ) . This project provides plenty of information about UniX operating systems like Linux, BSD and Solaris on laptops, notebooks, PDAs and other mobile computers. Therefore he has chosen a name, which expresses this by a combination of the word "Mobile" and the common suffix "iX" taken from UniX(TM). The plaintiff asserts that Werner Heuser had chosen this name to take advantage of their well-known comic book character "Obelix" for which they own a trademark. This outcome of the charge is a great pity, not only for the Free Software movement, because it is one more example showing that the big-players become more and more capable to monopolize large parts of the language. In this case almost all trademarks and domains ending with the suffix "ix" are under threat. Another recent case is the German Telekom trying to monopolize all occurences of the letter "T" in logos and company names. They have even bought domains like t-wurst.de (transl. t-sausage), tsex.de and t-beutel.de (transl. t-bag) to protect their logo and to prevent others from using those domains. Also they charged some companies, which were using some kind of "T" in their logos, more at Free-T http://free-t.de (in German). A detailed documentation of the case, containing information about other projects under siege and the written statements of the lawyers JBB http://jbb.de , is available online at http://tuxmobil.org/mobilix_asterix.html /* * * Please help TuxMobil by updating BOOKMARKS FROM mobilix.org TO TuxMobil.org! * */ -- |=| Werner Heuser = Keplerstr. 11A = D-10589 Berlin = Germany |=| <wehe at tuxmobil.org> T. 0049 - (0)30 - 349 53 86 |=| http://TuxMobil.org UniX on Mobile Systems: HOWTOs,Software |*| This is no time for phony rhetoric -- Lou Reed -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
