[Asterisk-biz] Asterisk Ffork - OpenPBX.org

[William Lloyd]

Selectively prosecuting trademark and copyright infringement is a  
problem.  Unless a company is shown to be defending a trademark in  
all cases of infringement then you can possibly lose the trademark.   
Unless of course you negotiate and have a license with people to use it.

This article says it better..

http://www.entreworld.org/Content/EntreByline.cfm?ColumnID=180

Specifically this bit seems relevant...

A company that tolerates misuse of its marks by the public and/or  
fails to enforce quality control standards in any licensing of the  
mark may lose its trademark rights, and, therefore, one of its most  
valuable weapons in the war for market share.

-bill



On 10-Oct-05, at 10:58 AM, Kevin P. Fleming wrote:

> Peter Nixon wrote:
>
>
>> So what you are saying is that what Novell and SUSE do by  
>> distributing Asterisk with OpenH323, Spandsp, BRIStuff and a few  
>> other patches all together on their FTP site, CDs and DVDs (not to  
>> mention all of the 3rd party mirrors) and calling them  
>> collectively Asterisk is illegal. Given that they have been doing  
>> so for longer than 12 months and there is no way that Digium could  
>> have not know about this has Digium filed suit against Novell for  
>> this (According to you) Trademark and Copyright infringing behavior?
>>
>
> I'm saying that it is possible for this behavior to be considered a  
> license/trademark infringement, if Digium chose to do so. Then  
> again, IANAL, so I can't say with certainty that this is true... we  
> will need to get some more clear trademark licensing documentation  
> written before anyone could say conclusively exactly what sort of  
> modifications are allowed without infringement.
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