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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Manager, Dueling Modems Computer Forum <http://dm.net>
