On Monday 11 June 2007 20:04, Bertrand Delacretaz wrote: > On 6/11/07, Xavier Hanin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > ....Any recommendation on how to use the uspto.gov search? Ivy is a > > common name and I get a lot of trademarks containing Ivy, but I don't > > know if they are relative to a software.... > > One thing is that the official name of your project is "Apache Ivy", > not just "Ivy". > > IANAL and cannot tell how much difference this makes when it comes to > trademark issues, though.
IANAL either, but the distinction is VERY important. Effectively, we don't need to worry about people registering such trademark later and demanding that we change name of the project, which otherwise is possible (at least some jurisdictions). But the ASF guideline is to "play nice" as much as possible. Meaning, even if we could make a (for instance) "Apache Illustrator" project from a legal point of view, we wouldn't because it "is not nice" to Adobe. If we leave the software industry, the possibilities becomes more open, but again, we want to try to be nice to others. For instance, Apache projects has a tendency to rank high on Google searches, and new Apache projects could cause some business a lot of harm by using their marks, key words and so forth. Registration of Trademarks in itself are not very expensive, so Jayasoft could register it and donate it to the ASF, as an additional safe guard. However, ASF will not be able to 'protect' the mark and hence it might be lost in the future, but at least someone else can't cause us problem in the near to mid term. Cheers -- Niclas Hedhman, Software Developer I live here; http://tinyurl.com/2qq9er I work here; http://tinyurl.com/2ymelc I relax here; http://tinyurl.com/2cgsug --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
