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."

Comments

Summary from ZDNET

[wiredog]

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.

Re:Summary from ZDNET

[dybvandal]

lets get a couple facts straight: 1) Gravenreuth often acts without having the "violated" party actually hiring him, which is fine by german law 2) in this case Gravenreuth was hired by the violated party 3) Gravenreuth send SuSe a letter in Okt. or Nov. saying that they may not include any software that violates their trademark but Suse did not feel like doing aynthing about it 4) Crayon as well as Gravenreuth where aware that the program was not part of Suse 7.3 (but there still is a link in some Koffice Menu for the app with the name Krayon) 5) the goal was to prevent SuSe from including a program with the name in any future releases 6) Suse 7.3 was actually never stoppped 7) Crayon did have an interest and the thing was settled without any license fees or other payments

Re:Summary from ZDNET

[psych031337]

"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.

Not quite. On their site, the company that set the legal action rolling claims that they hired the lawyer to ensure the trademark compliance.
It looks more like someone from "Crayon" (the copyright holder) did not have a clue what the "Krayon" software (which is a part of KOffice) on the distro actually did. This is easy to understand, because the software pack named "Krayon" wasn't even on the distro cd's, the installation routine only created a menu entry. At first Crayon`s lawyer only sent a "Declaration of Omission" and asked for signature from SuSE. This would be like saying "OK, we did wrong, we admit, we won't ever do it again or pay the agreed amount if we do". I understand that SuSE declined to sign this statement, which then evoked the lawyer to file the suit for more pressure.
No license charges have been agreed upon and both companies see this as a misunderstanding which they are done with now. The original press declaration, unfortunately only in german language is available on http://www.crayon.de/presseerklaerung.html

More like unauthorised action than a settlement

[Polaris]

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 lawyer responsible has history of extortion

[Zergwyn]

It pisses me off that the company Crayon itself admitted that it was just looking for a quick buck. Crayon is so generic, it KDE would almost certainly have won in court, but like so many other tech companies the time it would take while it would be barred from distributing SuSE made it easier just to settle. Which is exactly what one Günther von Gravenreuth was counting on. As stated in The Register, "He presents himself as a normal lawyer, but in fact he is a dangerous criminal. He is dangerous because he infiltrates the judicial system by means of legal practices. His intentions are destructive. He tries to hurt legally inexperienced developers, designers, service providers and other members of the information technology generation.

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.

Re:Do we know what trademark was violated?

[sconest]

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.

In some countries,

[jd]

if a trademark becomes the generic term (eg: hoover is both the name of a product, and a verb to describe the act of using a vaccuum cleaner), then the company has a much more limited control over that name.

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.

Re:i'm just glad

[Lars T.]

According to this article (in German), Gravenreuth did act on behalf of the company.

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.

jd's article is not "informative"

[JoeBuck]

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.