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

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.

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.