[asterisk-biz] Open letter to digium, asterisk developers and consultants

[Matthew Rubenstein]

	You are wrong. Xerox never lost their trademark to the public domain:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox#Trademark_issues_and_name_usage .
Neither did IBM.

	Just because people use the trademarked mark casually to refer to
something related to the actual marked commercial product, doesn't
dilute the mark. Only a commercial use of the mark to identify a product
directly competing in the industrial category in which the mark is
registered is dilution and prohibited. Casual use of the mark as a
generic term can make it harder for a mark holder to police further
abuse of its mark commercially, but that's a double edged sword which
defines that whole class of product in terms of the marketed mark,
delivering value to the marked product.

	So you can say (or write) "xerox" or "IBM" anytime you want. *Except*
when you mean by it "this product" but that product is not a Xerox (or
IBM) product.

	Trademark is simple. All it does is protect the definition in commerce
(within a narrowly, explicitly preregistered industrial category) of a
word or symbol to mean only the specific product (or range) of the
specific mark holder. The test of trademark violation is whether it
creates (or reasonably would create) confusion in the market among
people looking for the correct product identified by that mark, but who
would instead find the wrong product. Trademark is the most sensible and
honest intellectual property defined by law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanham_Act


On Tue, 2008-06-10 at 00:24 -0500, asterisk-biz-request at lists.digium.com
wrote:
> Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 16:06:51 -0700
> From: Miles Scruggs <asterisk at wideideas.com>
> Subject: Re: [asterisk-biz] Open letter to digium,      asterisk
> developers and consultants
> To: Commercial and Business-Oriented Asterisk Discussion
>         <asterisk-biz at lists.digium.com>
> Message-ID: <D076BC06-F33D-4800-A52F-D3BEDC19540C at wideideas.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes
> 
> I could be wrong but iirc IBM lost their trademark to public domain
> in  
> the same manner as xerox did.
> 
> On Jun 9, 2008, at 3:46 PM, Matthew Rubenstein wrote:
> 
> > We're not talking about the (engineering) design, we're talking
> about
> > the trademark. I'm pretty sure that IBM protects the "IBM" trademark
> > viciously wherever possible.
-- 

(C) Matthew Rubenstein