On Sun, 11 Dec 2005, Daniel Carrera wrote: > The .org was nor registered until last year. Alex just checked in > Australia, and I just did another check for the UK, Canada and South > Africa. The name is not owned. It was owned once in Canada, but that > expired 3 years ago (maybe that's why Sun didn't choose it 5 years ago). > This covers practically all of the English speaking world.
"Open Office" is apparently a registered trademark in Benelux countries (Belgia-Netherlands-Luxenburg), owned by V.W.T. Sessink company. See http://www.openoffice.nl/over_ons/merkenbescherming.html and use BabelFish. Owning a trademark means that a company has rights on things such as domain names. For example, V.W.T Sessink has already registered openoffice.nl domain, and is trying to register openoffice.eu. I don't know anything about the case, but I'd think that OOo people at Netherlands may not be too happy about the company. Other countries have similar situations, for example here in Finland, a company named "OpenOffice Finland Oy" is holding the openoffice.fi domain, though it has no trademark over OpenOffice. The company sells an older closed-source version of OOo as permitted by SISSL license, although it now distributes also the OSS version of OOo 2.0. We are pretty annoyed about this because people visiting the web site get an impression that OO(o) is a commercial product just like any other office suite, not "open" in the Open Source Software way. It also has gotten a special marketing place, which is unfair to other companies offering OOo services. Registering OpenOffice as a trademark locally and globally (through WTO TRIPS / WIPO) would help us avoid all sorts of abuse. The problem with trademarks is, of course, that they need to be watched over. The "OpenOffice" or "Open Office" do not appear to be registered at WIPO's Madrid Database. IANAL, so I don't have a clue about the legal relationships between WIPO and local trademarks. >From what I have observed, most people call OOo just "OpenOffice", including newspapers and organisations using or planning to use OOo. -- Marko Grönroos, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (http://www.iki.fi/magi/) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
