On 7/25/17, 4:45 PM, "cwsteinb...@gmail.com on behalf of Carl Steinbach" <cwsteinb...@gmail.com on behalf of c...@apache.org> wrote:
> "IceWeasel" and "MetaStore" are both examples of English compound words. > What exactly makes the former any safer than the latter? Usually descriptive words are considered weaker for trademarks - if the words describe what it does, then it might be weaker. "PainKiller" is a weak one, while "Aspirin" isn't. Uniqueness is useful, because an active defense is necessary to retain possession of a trademark - as a tautology, the more unique the phrase, the fewer occurrences there are to tackle. But, in the case of Aspirin, Bayer did not defend the use lowercase "aspirin" and now only has a TM on the upper-case one "Aspirin". IceWeasel is an infamous precedent of trademark dispute in the open source community "The end of the Iceweasel Age" - https://lwn.net/Articles/676799/ + https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=354622 Cheers, Gopal
