Re: Project Naming (was Re: [VOTE] Accept Glasgow into Incubator)

[Craig L Russell]

This discussion reminds me of the legal case that McDonalds brought against a small coffee shop in Half Moon Bay who had been doing business for 20 years as McCoffee's. Once McD discovered that they could claim any food-related trademark beginning with Mc, their lawyers were off in hot pursuit. They eventually settled the suit with an appropriate degree of rancor by changing their name to M Coffee. :-(

Craig

On Aug 7, 2006, at 3:39 AM, Gav.... wrote:

Seriously, while it's possible that someone could later on try to register a name already in use by an Apache project, said trademark registration would of necessity include a reference to the prior use (if relevant) at Apache. And if the registration owner tried to come after Apache later, first use would probably win (assuming any sense of fair play). But IANAL. And remember M Coffee.

-----Original Message-----
From: robert burrell donkin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, 7 August 2006 4:41 AM
To: general@incubator.apache.org

Subject: Re: Project Naming (was Re: [VOTE] Accept Glasgow into Incubator)

<snip>

given the amount of upset caused by names, i think that we should
appoint sanjiva as chief-name-wangler. his role would be to seek out
remote parts of the world with languages as yet untouched by

for apache projects  ;-)

commercial name mining and come back with a harvest of great new names

Would have to be kept up to date in this regard.


A name, it gets checked, yep all good and no legal issues, we now have
(e.g.) barney.apache.org. Its been going a few months and then some
External Company decides to trademark 'barney' as a piece of java
Software - what is the legal stance there? I don't know, but I suppose
I'm asking without looking, do names chosen for Apache projects get
Legally protected by ASF, first come first served and all that.?

Gav...

Im sure (well 99% sure) this was in jest, but before coming to this point In the discussion I was thinking along the lines of maybe having a file Somewhere where a wide range of suitable names live, projects could then Choose one knowing it has already gone through all the legal stuff etc. This however has its downside in that in the future, some of these names May get snapped up externally and get trademarked etc, meaning the file .. bringing me to my real question, suppose an incubating project choose

- robert

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Craig Russell
Architect, Sun Java Enterprise System http://java.sun.com/products/jdo
408 276-5638 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
P.S. A good JDO? O, Gasp!

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