> Actually, it isn't trademark protection, at least in any of the usual senses. > But it may be fraud, or at least misrepresentation of the product. Well, actually that is almost the same thing. A (common law) trademark is defined as a distinctive sign used by a legal entity to uniquely identify the source of its product to consumers, in order to distinguish them from products of others. (Note that it need not be registered in common law jurisdictions, although registration has advantages.) >From the beginning trademark infringement has been associated with the common law tort of "passing off". In the US the Lanham Act was enacted specifically to deter false or misleading statements in advertising or promotion that may harm the holder of a mark. In economic theories of law such marks are justified by the lowering of informational costs for the consumer, who can be sure that once it is ascertained that a product fulfils a need, a subsequent product bearing the mark is essentially the same as that originally tested. This maps rather directly to the issue at hand. The IETF as a legal entity used the term SMTP to designate a particular protocol. Although the IETF is not technically the source of all implementations, the RFC (and especially one with reference code) can be considered the source which was being protected. If one were to apply "SMTP" to a protocol not conforming to RFC 2821, that would be passing off that protocol to consumers by making misleading statements. Furthermore, as it would not interoperate with RFC 2821 conformant implementations, the information costs would be increased as each time the term was used one would have to test interoperability. Y(J)S _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf