Gaim becomes Pidgin [LWN.net]

Gaim becomes Pidgin

Posted Apr 9, 2007 3:01 UTC (Mon) by hp (subscriber, #5220)
In reply to: Gaim becomes Pidgin by tetromino
Parent article: Gaim becomes Pidgin

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.

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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.