On Tue, 2005-08-23 at 22:04 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
> Company A did license the executable, for execution only on
> proprietary hardware which it designed and manufactured.
> Company B later came along and trademarked the term mentioned
> above.
> Company B's lawyers informed Company A's lawyers that all
> use of the now trademarked term belonged solely to Company
> B, and that any use of Company B's now trademarked term
> must cease.
> Company A's lawyers informed all personnel in Company A that
> all such terms must be removed from all documentation.
Bingo! That's the logic right there. Company A had a _written_
licensing agreement. Public distribution doesn't matter. You had a
_written_ licensing agreement.
> After the engineers complained that there would be a massive
> editing effort to modify *comments*, the lawyers of Company A
> and Company B got together, studied the law, and concluded
> that, to comply with the law, Company A must perforce modify
> all documents, including non-disclosed proprietary trade
> secret source, even in comments, so that the now trademarked
> term did not appear anywhere.
Yes, because Company A was contractually obligated to terms in its
_written_ licensing agreement. Dude, read some of these written
agreements sometime. ;->
> That is not what the corporate lawyers concluded, and the company
> spent many $$$ to comply, belive me.
I know, I believe you. But company A (yours I assume) had a _written_
licensing agreement. Doesn't matter that it wasn't on the software
itself, it was for a product from company B, and there were trademarks
you had agreed to _in_writing_. Even if they come later, read that
original, _written_ licensing agreement.
It's different when you do _not_ have something in writing.
So your story is 0% applicable.
> Perhaps now that the situation is more clear, we can be talking
> on the same page. (Unless we already were :-)
Yes, we were.
In fact, signing a licensing agreement with LMI might be _worse_.
Because if it has clauses that say they can change the terms at any
time, they might be able to, depending on how significant.
-- Bryan
P.S. I worked in the semiconductor industry for almost 2 years were the
typical _single_user_ software license was over $250,000! You betcha
they had references to not using trademarks, and I had to make sure my
code and scripts and other custom build tools obeyed them! It sounds
like your company made a major oversight and suffered the
consequences. ;->
--
Bryan J. Smith b.j.smith@xxxxxxxx http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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