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SuSE No Longer Barred From Selling
MobyTurbo writes "According to a press release SuSE is no longer barred from selling Linux as reported and discussed in a thread on slashdot. SuSE is settling out of court with a German company called "Crayon" that claims that the KDE app Krayon violates their trademark. Incidentally, this vulnerability probably applies to several other distributions."
Zdnet reports that the "Krayon" app isn't even included in the distro. Also, "Crayon apparently was not interested in pursuing the case" and "In Germany, trademark suits can be filed by any attorney, even if that attorney doesn't represent the trademark holder" So it looks like the lawyer saw the opportunity for a quick kill, and missed.
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Actually, it seems the attorneys who took out the injunction were acting without the authority of the trademark holder, who was then found to be indifferent to the issue and not interested in pursuing it. It seems to be a quirk of German law that attorneys can do this (act first and get authorisation later).
The Register has an article on this story here
http://www.crayon.de/produkte.html They make software, not crayons :)
The Bigger The Headache The Bigger the Pill
In particular, he uses the regulations of trademark and patent law, because in this area the judical uncertainty is very high."
It always annoys me to see this kind of abuse of the legal system, where over complicated proceedings and legal language makes it too much trouble for companies to fight, and encourages them to just settle. This rewards frivolous suits, instead of punishing them as it should. Sigh.
I suppose this is due to the fact that Suse is a german company and that it is easier to sue a national company than a foreign one.
Then again, IANAL.
Guvf vf abg n EBG zrffntr
Crayon is pretty much in that state. A "crayon drawing" is a drawing made with the application of coloured wax sticks. It does NOT require the use of wax sticks from a specific company. If a person draws something in crayon, again, it does not mean they went out and selected a specific brand of wax drawing implement.
From that, SuSE should have been able to contend that "crayon", as pertains to anything other than wax sticks, has entered the public domain. As such, it can no longer be subject to trademark suits for anything other than attempts to directly clone the original product and sell that product under false pretenses.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The company (or rather their lawyer Gravenreuth) send an "Abmahnung" against SuSE to not publish CDs with Krayon on it. SuSE didn't sign it (probably because the CDs didn't even contain Krayon), and then the company got an injunction against SuSE.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
No. Gravenreuth (the lawyer) has never worked for M$ AFAIK. But law suits like this one are very common in germany :-(
An example: we have here a small company Symicron GmbH (point at the link "Unsere Produkte"), which has a trademark for "explorer". The lawyer of that company is Gravenreuth, and there have been a couple of suits against several individuals and companies, mostly because they made links on their web sites to software like ftp explorer or distributed it somehow. (Fortunately Gravenreuth has lost most of these cases.)
M$ Germany has an agreement with Symicron about using "explorer" for their windows exploder, and that is the only reason why they didn't meet Gravenreuth at the court.
Gravenreuth is really a very ugly person and has no friends, but that doesn't mean he works for M$ :-)
There are a list of active trademarks used generically as well as a list of defunct ones here: http://rinkworks.com/words/eponyms.shtml Hmmm... I never knew "Aspirin" was a trademark.
As noted elsewhere, the suit was filed on Crayon's behalf by an ambulance chaser (not the company itself). This yahoo story has more background. Regardless, the suit only affected distribution in Germany of SuSE.
jd apparently does not understand that trademarks protect adjectives, not nouns. "Crayon" is not a generic name for a certain type of computer program: the trademark holder has a trademark for a computer program named Crayon, not for the word Crayon. If Suse tried to contend that "crayon" as the name of a computer program has entered the public domain, they would be laughed out of court. The concept you're confused about has to do with, say, Kleenex becoming a generic name for a facial tissue ("a kleenex"). This concept has gotten confused further by the DNS issues: before the domain name fights, it was clearer that you can't own a word, only certain applications of that word ("apple" as the name of a computer is owned by one company, "apple" as the name of a record company by another).
People need to know that if you write a clone of a program, and the program's name is not a generic name for the type of program in question (like "graph" for a graphing program), it's not legitimate to name your program just by putting a K or a G in front of the other program's name. So, "killustrator" would be a clear loser if ever taken to court, because even though Illustrator is a word, it is not a generic term describing a vector-graphics drawing program, and furthermore it will be easy to show that the name is not a coincidence, that the namer intends to suggest a relationship between the two programs.
Similarly, the FSF might well have a case against a proprietary program that uses GNU in its name: even though it hasn't formerly registered GNU, it's been using it as a mark for a long time in business (the FSF sells CDs, tapes, etc) and it is a widely recognized and respected name.