[asterisk-biz] Digium enforcing its trademarks

[Matt Riddell]

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flavio wrote:
| I was checking right now. The trademark complaint,  was not targeted
to us,
| specifically. I believe, Digium has asked google not only to remove
ads with
| the words Asterisk or Digium, but to stop printing any ad using the
keywords
| Asterisk and Digium. There is no single adword being presented now,
when you
| search Asterisk or Digium. So, marketing Asterisk related products or
| services using google adwords is not an option anymore. I don't know
if it
| is temporary or permanent, but it seems permanent.

Um, I have a adword campaign with a keyword Asterisk.  I checked it a
couple of hours ago and its fine.

Its a little pointless here in New Zealand because there is a Linux
company in Auckland who has been running for ages and is called Asterisk.

They're reachable on http://www.asterisk.co.nz and have the byline:

"Asterisk - Bringing the power and choice of Linux and Open Source to
New Zealand businesses "

When the firefly VoIP phone was out (from an Australian company),
Asterisk's website was getting the highest rankings because they have a
product called FIrefly Firewall/VPN.

http://www.asterisk.co.nz/asterisk/content/e555/e684/index_eng.html

What makes it worse is that the website states:

"Asterisk is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Gen-i Ltd, a Telecom NZ company."

Telecom NZ is the single major telco in New Zealand and is obviously at
risk of losing out substantially through the use of VoIP.

It wouldn't surprise me if they bought the company so that they are able
to effectively redirect requests at a later stage when Asterisk (the
software) starts to gain significant market share here.

These would be my preferred targets for keeping the Asterisk name clean.

On the other hand, if you have 100 companies all stating they are the
source for "Asterisk", and 99 of them have no idea what they are doing,
surely it demeans the name "Asterisk" for all of us.

In the long run there's probably not much that can be done to remedy
this situation but hopefully everyone will gain experience in using
Asterisk.

The problem is that by catering to every need from every person "the
telephony toolbox", you provide many options to let an inexperienced
user hang themselves.  If you were to make this less likely it would be
at the expense of configuration options and would therefore make it
difficult to deploy in given scenarios.

- --
Kind Regards,

Matt Riddell
Director
_______________________________________________

http://www.venturevoip.com (Great new VoIP end to end solution)
http://www.venturevoip.com/news.php (Daily Asterisk News - html)
http://www.venturevoip.com/newrssfeed.php (Daily Asterisk News - rss)
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