Roy T. Fielding wrote:
On Dec 27, 2004, at 8:16 PM, Alex Karasulu wrote:
Before discussing each specific item below I'd like to point out a few things. The ASF had through the incubator given us a link to an online service for looking up trademarks. We were told this service should be used to determine if there were any infringements with project names. I personally used the service for two of the names cited in the items below.
We normally start with that and also do a Google search.
Yep Google seems to be a better source than the U.S. PTO these days.
I guess you don't speak Icelandic but it does not take much to interpret this as a TM filiing. The English button does not seem to work at getting a translation of this record. I gathered it was the same company mostly from the logo. Damn! Depressing as it is we have to change the name.
According to the ASF the existance of any trademark alone was not an issue. For there to be an infringement the trademark would have to fall within the same field and domain where the names also match exactly. In the case of the Eve Directory Server for example, the presence of a trademark for "Eve Online", an online game would not be an infringement. I understand your concern but this is not the same name. BTW note that "Eve Online" did not exist in 2002 when we first started using the name Eve Directory Server for this project.
Apparently, the same company has a trademark on "EVE" in Europe and they have
already used it to force a hardware company in the UK to rename their product.
Here is their Icelandic registration
http://www.els.stjr.is/focal/webguard.nsf/key2/br103-2001.html
From the language and terms on the incubator site I was completely under the impression that this kind of name use would not present any legal issues.
Goal #1 is "do the right thing". Goal #2 is "protect our assets".
Absolutely! No one is trying to do the wrong thing obviously. It's a matter of being informed.
1) Has Matt Walsh approved transfer of the SEDA name? Is that libraryNo there is no relation between our seda package and the SEDA project on Sourceforge. We just named this thing, seda because we had no name for it at the time. SEDA is what it is as far as the architecture used. It's like naming a cat, cat. I think the SEDA project on Sourceforge actually calls the respective code with the same fuction Sandstorm. SEDA is an acronym used for Staged Event Driven Architecture as you probably already know. It was part of Matt Welsh's doctoral thesis and hence the name and the technology is not something that can hold a trademark. At least this is my understanding - perhaps this can be clarified by legal.
a direct descendant of <http://sourceforge.net/projects/seda/>, in
which case the version numbering should be 4.0, or does it merely use
his architecture (in which case it is wrong to use the name)?
Sorry, software products are not named "product" -- they are given names to
distinguish them from other software. We do not use other people's existing
names without their permission because it would confuse everyone, including me.
[We learned that the hard way with httpd, even though we had permission.]
Matt's toolkit may be code-named Sandstorm, but it is distributed as seda on
Sourceforge. You should name it something like "sedakit" (which probably means
something in another language) or "apseda" (which may be Latin, for all I know).
We can call it that fine: apseda it is.
Furthermore the concept of Threads for example was invented by some OS manufacturer but there are threads implementations all over like pthreads. When does it become an infringement? If we call a SEDA implementation seda? See what I mean? Its kind of nebulous here. I'd like some clarification myself. Regardless I'm totally fine with changing the name here.
I doubt that Matt trademarked the name -- we should simply "do the right thing"
and avoid confusion.
Yes I will rename it apseda right away. I don't think people at Directory care anymore what things are to be called. If anyone objects to the name let me know. I will begin renaming this and Eve. For Eve I think we can just call it the Apache Directory server and be done with it as well.
<snip/>
Snickers is an ASN.1 software library which is a Snacc4J replacement. It's obviously not a candy bar. Do they really have the right to enforce a Cease and Desist? This is definately trademarked by MARS as you say no doubt about that. We need to rename this as well but just for clarification how do companies like this get away with it?
They don't need the "right" -- they merely need to avoid a countersuit for
obstruction. Because it is a well-established mark and that mark is used on the
Internet, they can reasonably constrain use of it on websites. Since the
name is being used because the real Snickers is a snack, we are actually using
the trademarked name (not just any name) and we would lose.
Yep no arguments here I changed the name but just had to ask. You have to admit it was cute and we were having fun with it and the play on snacc4j. But this is not what we are about - we shall just focus on the substance from now on.
In general, a good rule of thumb is to walk gingerly around companies who
employ teams of lawyers for the purpose of protecting their marks. It simply
doesn't matter why we *might* win such a suit, since the suit alone would be
enough to bury our little foundation in debt.
Of course Roy you are absolutely right.
5) Kerberos is a trademark of MIT. We cannot legally distribute software
under that name.
No trademark is registered with Kerberos as far as I can see. Also looks like Enrique performed some similar searches and found:
"The USPTO Trademark Electronic Search System shows efforts by MIT to trademark Kerberos in the early 90's were abandoned. Published articles up until the late 90's may claim a trademark by MIT, but this is not the case. "
Okay, sorry that I didn't see the abandoned bit. Once the STATUS file is updated
(be sure to update the table entries for the IP stuff), I have no objection to
releasing the non-trademarked name products.
Excellent!
Overall we will respond to this advice immediately, to apply it and forge ahead. Thanks for your dilligence on these matters. If we do not confront them now it will only get uglier down the road. As for now could you please take the time to reassess the second vote for the release of naming, asn1 (formerly known as Snickers) and the ldap-common library? I think we have responded well to your recommendations for these items.
Thanks, Alex
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