Trademarks will not deter crooks

Posted Sep 1, 2005 6:28 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
Parent article: Free Software And Trademarks

Claims that trademark law offers any protection at all against fraudsters are just ludicrous. Putting out an altered Firefox that is designed to steal financial transaction info is already a felony. Calling this altered program "Firefox" would allow the Mozilla folks to sue, and that's all. Please do not use arguments that make no sense.

Trademarks will not deter crooks

Posted Sep 2, 2005 16:46 UTC (Fri) by gerv (guest, #3376) [Link]

My example was perhaps an extreme one. There are plenty of things which are on the right side of the law but the wrong side of decency - spyware which sends your browsing history off to marketing companies, for example.

In the case of the out-and-out crooks, the additional protection we get is being able to say to Google or others "that's our trademark - please pull their ads", and cut off their air supply. They are much less harmful if no-one knows they exist.

Gerv