[asterisk-biz] Digium enforcing its trademarks

[Craig Lawrence]

Personally, I can see nothing wrong in what Digium is doing to protect
its name and market position. It's well overdue in my opinion (try
searching on other major brand names and see what happens).

The eventual outcome is going to be that authorized partners of Digium
will be allowed to advertise and those that are not will be excluded (a
positive outcome in my opinion). The only down side is that there is a
short term restriction on adverts whilst some folks get authorized.

In Australia, Google now only displays the one advert for the Authorized
Australian Distributor of Digium when you search on the terms 'Asterisk'
and 'Digium'.  So in this market the only authorized Territory Distro is
attempting to sell direct to retail customers and cut out their own
channel.  Imagine if you had that situation in USA/Canada!!

Also interesting is that when you search on the term 'Sangoma' in
Australia you get fed with an advert for the sale Digium Distributor!!!

It seems somewhat hypocritical to rely on trademark protection in one
instance but abuse it in another.

Cheers


Craig Lawrence


-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Kevin P.
Fleming
Sent: Friday, 18 January 2008 11:01 AM
To: Commercial and Business-Oriented Asterisk Discussion
Subject: Re: [asterisk-biz] Digium enforcing its trademarks

Brian West wrote:

> You shouldn't have to contact Digium for such use cases as "Asterisk  
> Compatible" or "Works with Asterisk".

The issue is *not* the use of the trademarks within the ad copy itself
(as you rightly point out), it is the purchase of search
results/listings for those trademarks via the AdWords process. As far as
I'm aware, it's perfectly acceptable to have an ad that says "Our
products are compatible with Asterisk" or "Our products are based on
Asterisk" or similar copy, but purchasing 'Asterisk' or 'Digium' as a
keyword to get those ads to show up in searches is not allowed unless
Digium has authorized you to do so.

-- 
Kevin P. Fleming
Director of Software Technologies
Digium, Inc. - "The Genuine Asterisk Experience" (TM)

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