A disagreement over the PostgreSQL trademark [LWN.net]

A disagreement over the PostgreSQL trademark

Posted Sep 22, 2021 21:30 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: A disagreement over the PostgreSQL trademark by calumapplepie
Parent article: A disagreement over the PostgreSQL trademark

“Any (and I mean ANY) use of your trademark on a product similar to that provided by you MUST be sued as infringment. [...] If you tolerate such products, then you lose the trademark”

Imagine if calumapplepie was right about this. and thus that every major brand in the world had "lost the trademark" presumably somehow across all jurisdictions -- because of course in practice big brands cannot and don't sue "any use of your trademark" but (even for the litigious ones like Disney) only whichever targets attract their legal staff for whatever reason.

It's absurd once you write it down like that, isn't it? But that's what this myth would have you believe.

But I'm sure calumapplepie isn't just a keyboard warrior here to insist upon their preferred myth but an actual lawyer, and so I look forward to them giving us some credentials and telling us where they're licensed to practice trademark law so that we can go look at local statutes to identify where this "sue or lose it" rule is, if anywhere, in their local law. Wait, actually if they're really a practising trademark lawyer they'd *know* where to look and can just tell us right?

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A disagreement over the PostgreSQL trademark

Posted Sep 22, 2021 21:58 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Like all legal stuff it's fuzzy.

But the *point* of trademark law is to prevent "passing off". If someone else uses your trademark in a manner which is likely to confuse your customers, and does it without explicit permission, then that is the scenario where you really have to sue.

Otherwise the courts will conclude you don't care. And that WILL cost you the trademark.

(The fuzziness is, of course, deciding what will or won't confuse your customers ... and in this case, I think it seems pretty clear.)

Cheers,
Wol

A disagreement over the PostgreSQL trademark

Posted Sep 23, 2021 10:23 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

You don't have to sue. That's the entire thesis here. You're going to keep going around this loop because you're convinced of a myth.

If you subsequently file suit, the court won't "conclude you don't care". You filed a lawsuit, so obviously you care.

Estoppel means that you can't win if your argument is that behaviour you previously ignored is suddenly now something you cared about and the court should retrospectively fix it. Time's arrow doesn't work that way, and the principle of estoppel reflects that. But Estoppel is deliberately very limited, it's just to prevent the sort of obvious unfairness of e.g. waiting until somebody's use of your mark makes them a nice profit and then swooping in to claim it for your own.