Microsoft Starts Legal Fight Over Lindows Name

actappan writes: "Whether or not Lindows is real, this article on CNET News.com indicates that Microsoft intends to sue them into oblivion. Looks like supression remains the best way to promote innovation." cyberlawyer adds: "Some of you may remember that MS originally had great difficulty obtaining a trademark for the generic term 'Windows' but was eventually able to pay off those who had filed letters of protest to the granting of the mark including Sun, Oracle, and Borland. As a trademark lawyer I (unhappily) have to admit that Lindows probably has a weak case. Of course it's never too late to bring a cancellation action based on genericide ;-)" CodeWheeney contributes a link to coverage at Yahoo, too.

Comments

heh. "Any press is good press"

[footility]

I think the Lindows people /knew/ from the beginning that MS would spend /their money/ to give the Lindows a little industry spotlight ;-) Kudos guys.

Re:Anyone remember X-Windows?

[SIGFPE]

Maybe they should call it 'L'. People can then informally call it the L-windows system but in court they can just turn round and say "no yer honour, it's called L, not L-windows, we can't control what everyone else calls it".

List of Generic Marks and Depends on Consumer

[idonotexist]

Conducting additional research on how Microsoft's mark for "Windows" may be generic, I ran across a list of "Trademarks That Have Become Generic." The list includes terms "held by the Trademark Office or a court to be incapable of serving as trademarks for the goods and services they named because they had become, in the minds of consumers, generic terms for those products or services."

So, the test would not be whether Microsoft or a particular judge considers that a mark is a generic term, but if the mark becomes a generic term in the minds of consumers. Perhaps a party could present evidence such as surveys or the online and published usage of a term in a generic sense as a means to describe the thing?

This is just Wine with a price tag, right?

[mactari]

Quotes from "Running other OSes" thread:
>>But with VMWare you have to buy/own a Windows
>>license, which kind of nullifies the price
>>advantage.

>Use Wine [winehq.com] then.

I'm betting that's exactly what Lindows is. A friend and I were discussing Wine's license recently, specifically wrt the percieved lack of contributions from Transgaming's WineX (a DirectX centered fork from Wine -- http://www.transgaming.com/) back into the original codebase.

It appeared to us that Wine has a pretty open license much like X11's (http://winehq.com/source/LICENSE). The only real stipulation is the following:

15 The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
16 all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

So how tough would it be to wrap up Wine in a box with a $99 price tag (price from Lindows' FAQ page: http://www.lindows.com/lindows_products_faqs.php)? Real easy, and legal too. Again, note that with Wine, you can run a ton of Windows software _without_ a licensed copy of Windows.

So to sum, take open sourced but not "RMS Free" (aka, GPL'd) code, name the result something Microsoft will have a problem with for the free press (as has been mentioned about a million times already), and *poof*, you've got the makings of a 90's style IPO. :^)