Gaim becomes Pidgin [LWN.net]

Gaim becomes Pidgin

Posted Apr 8, 2007 20:49 UTC (Sun) by tetromino (subscriber, #33846)
In reply to: Gaim becomes Pidgin by tetromino
Parent article: Gaim becomes Pidgin

Corrections:
AOL applied for its "AIM" trademark in 2000 and received it in 2001 (the September 2005 one was for the AIM logo). However, Gaim has been called Gaim since 1999, so the basic point still stands.

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Gaim becomes Pidgin

Posted Apr 9, 2007 3:01 UTC (Mon) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

While IANAL, I'm pretty sure trademarks can be trademarks purely due to usage, even without registration. Wikipedia INAL either, but see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Establishing_trade... for example

Not saying anything either way about the merits of AOL's case in general, just saying that the trademark registration date may not mean very much.

Gaim becomes Pidgin

Posted Apr 9, 2007 12:20 UTC (Mon) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

This may be so, but the AOL Lawyers "accepted" the name "gaim" as avoiding their trademark "AOL Instant Messenger". So in some sense AOL tacitly accepted an in-use mark which conflicted with one they later registered. It's possible this is not a strong legal argument, but to me it's bad faith.

And certainly when you look at the AOL lawyer brigade practices over the years, I see a whole bunch of deplorable activity. (offtopic:) It saddens me that in order to get acceptable treatment, these humans (developers) had to create a corporation. Normal people, real humans, seemingly cannot get justice in our system.