The return of Iceweasel [LWN.net]

The return of Iceweasel

Posted Sep 29, 2006 9:10 UTC (Fri) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474)
In reply to: The return of Iceweasel by Jel
Parent article: The return of Iceweasel

Well with the minimum of effort you could have actually checked whether or not they own the word "Firefox", and in fact they do:

http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entr...

Rich.

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The return of Iceweasel

Posted Sep 29, 2006 9:29 UTC (Fri) by Jel (guest, #22988) [Link]

Well, honestly, I wasn't that interested, and I'm not familiar with the
USPTO's website, being a citizen of a different country.

It's interesting. I didn't realise that trademarks apply to such a small
field; their trademark is basically just for web browsers; I figured a
software trademark would cover the entire software field. Seems too
narrow to me; if searching for "firefox" on the web complicates finding a
firefox database, then they should have had to prove their right to
override that name, it seems to me.

The return of Iceweasel

Posted Sep 29, 2006 13:45 UTC (Fri) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270) [Link]

Trademarks may apply to a company, a particular product, a particular service, etc. I suspect there are more product trademarks than company name trademarks.

The Firefox trademark

Posted Sep 29, 2006 18:15 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

There are two kinds of "apply to." The trademark registration tells what Mozilla is using the trademark for. But the trademark gives Mozilla the right to exclude others from using the trademark for lots of similar things too.

I don't know where the line gets drawn, but based on how broadly the rights have been granted in a few famous trademark cases, I would think someone with trademark rights on a Firefox database manager could stop someone from distributing a Firefox web browser.