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Trademarks and their limitsTrademarks and their limitsPosted Feb 6, 2013 22:11 UTC (Wed) by gerv (subscriber, #3376)Parent article: Trademarks and their limits
Mozilla has had some success chasing this sort of shady behaviour. See these articles on my blog:
http://blog.gerv.net/?s=Protecting+Germans&submit=Search
Gerv
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Trademarks and their limits Posted Feb 7, 2013 1:28 UTC (Thu) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link]
Yes, exactly. The problem here isn't trademark law - it gives you the tools needed to do this, albeit imperfectly. The problem is having the resources to do use trademark law to do enforcement, which (at the moment) Mozilla does and OOo/LO do not.
Trademarks and their limits Posted Feb 7, 2013 19:42 UTC (Thu) by rcweir (subscriber, #48888) [Link]
The trick, I think, is not to focus exclusively on the trademark use in the download, since as Jon points out, they could just be distributing the exact same version of the product, but with the malware in the form of "installer" in front.
Instead, look at the trademark use that is involved in their paid ad placement on Google, or Bing, or spam in Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. Without this, they have no easy way to lure users to their site. That trademark use is less innocent.
These entry points are easier to deal with, since, for example, Google will remove certain kinds of ads based on complaints from trademark owners. Bing has similar options. I suspect Twitter, Facebook, etc., do as well.
So having ownership of a trademark has value even if you never are in court, since ownership permits you to make these kinds of complaints. Malware sitting off on the web someplace is far less of a concern if it is not the first hit when you search for a popular open source package.
Trademarks and their limits Posted Feb 7, 2013 19:46 UTC (Thu) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link]
Right, though tackling the search engines is still time-consuming to start and keep up with. Resources, unfortunately, are needed - though not as much as a lawsuit.
Trademarks and their limits Posted Feb 14, 2013 6:11 UTC (Thu) by Mook (guest, #71173) [Link] To echo the costs of enforcing names through search engines: Apparently jb of VLC spends three hours a week taking care of that for VLC. I assume it's probably more for him due to the high profile of the project, but still...
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