Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> 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_
I complete fail to understand your logic.
> licensing agreement. Public distribution doesn't matter. You had a
> _written_ licensing agreement.
How can a company have a written agreement about its
own source?
>
>
>>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. ;->
I don't know how to make it clear.
>
>>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.
Company A and Company B had absolutely nothing to do with each other.
Company A bought nothing from Company B.
Company B bought nothing from Company A.
Company A licensed nothing from Company B.
Company B licensed nothing from Company A.
Perhaps this will help:
Suppose you wrote some software, and called it SoftX in the
comments in your source code. Suppose you sell SoftX, and
use promotional literature using the term "SoftX".
Later, without any relationship between us, (I in fact live
in another country and know nothing about you) I trademark the
term "SoftX" in my country, which has treaties with your country.
Then I find out that you are using that term.
I contact you, and instruct you that you are using my trademark,
and insist that you cease and desist forthwith.
THAT is what happened.
[snip]
> 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. ;->
P.S. I worked in Telecomm, where the license agreement for our
software was $6,000,000.00 USD.
Mike
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