On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 12:44 -0500, Barry L. Kline wrote:
> IANAL (thankfully) but IIRC, for one to maintain a copyright or
> trademark you must actively pursue anyone who infringes on it. You lose
> your trademark protection if you go after someone who uses the trademark
> (say, Microsoft decides to release Red Hat Windows) and they can prove
> that you had not gone after others who had done the same.
You are correct about the fact that trademarks need to be defended,
copyright does not have to be defended for it to be valid you can wait
20 years to defend your copyright even if you are aware of the
violations and not have it effect copyright. The only thing it may
effect is your ability to get statutory damages.
>
> So, like it or not, Red Hat has little choice.
>
> On top of that, they are being good GPL citizens by releasing their SRC
> rpms -- which they are not required to do. From what I understand of
> the GPL, they are required to release the source code of anything they
> build on top of GPL software. But they are not required to make it
> relatively painless to generate a virtual clone of their product -- e.g.
> source RPMs.
>
> If the only thing that CentOS has to do to satisfy RH legal is to remove
> the offending trademark infringements, then that's fine. My only
> concern is their request to remove links. There's a grey area that
> would require some discussion.
Linking has been shown under US federal law to be legal from all the
cases I've heard of.
Also trademarks are not black & white ... if a trademark term is being
used descriptively or for comparison it is legal from what I understand.
This is why you can write reviews of products, even negative reviews,
and the owner of the mark can't force you to remove their marks. Same
goes for commercials comparing your product to a competitors, allowing
you to use their marks for the comparison (except in France from what I
understand).
The standard dislaimer IANAL and TINLA applies.
Paul
