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SuSE No Longer Barred From Selling

Posted by Hemos on from the crayola-next dept.

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."

3 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Do we know what trademark was violated? by javilon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    And why it did take it against SUSE instead of against the writer of the application?

    Or if they are going to do something against Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, etc...

    And what the name of the application is?

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  2. Wonder if Binney&Smith have heard of this... by wowbagger · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Since they are Crayola, could they bring suit against the German company? Could a lawyer in Gemany bring suit against the folks who brought suit against SuSE? Could a lawyer nominally working for SuSE bring suit on behalf of Binney&Smith?

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  3. No it's not stupid by CaptainZapp · · Score: 4, Interesting
    ...it's called extortion and is pretty common paractice in Germany. Essentially it works like this:

    Find a victim

    Go to a court and demand preliminary injunction. It's not really important that you have grounds for that, you only have to convince a judge

    A mass-cease and desist mailing (with hefty lawyerly costs attached) is an alternative approach

    Offer entity suffering from the injunction that for a low, low service charge the injunction could be lifted

    Find new victim and repeat ad nauseum

    That's not to say that I condonce such behavior. It's pretty much a rip-off scheme comparable with what some US ambulance chasers do by suing companies on a grondless basis. But as long some German laws are pretty rediculous*), this will not stop.

    The Reg has it in more detail.

    *)For example, C&A offered customers a 20% discount in the first week of the Euro intorduction, if they didn't pay cash. A court prohibit that, even though the rebate laws in Germany where relaxed a while ago. If a competitor (or anybody for that matter) doesn't like what you're doing, they get you on grounds of "unfair competition" laws, nowadays.

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