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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."
What does Crayola have to say about this?
Walk with Music;
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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I suppose they must have done some market research and discovered that only a small percentage of children were actually eschewing real Crayons and turning to a KDE menu option for their coloring needs. Their colored-wax-stick market share is safe.
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?
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
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?
www.eFax.com are spammers
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
Perhaps crayon is considered a general word, like tissue. The trademark name comes from the brand, in this case Crayola (Kleenex).
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.
Come tot think of it, how is it possible that Gravenreuth still lives: hitmen are not that expensive, even in Germany, and if enough computer dealers pooled their money...
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
Crayon Vertriebs has announced that to inhibit any future potential dilution of market value of their brand "Crayon", they intend to seek injunctions against the following 22,103 defendants:
Arayon 49 hits.
Brayon 463 hits.
Drayon 285 hits.
Erayon 30 hits.
Frayon 100 hits.
Grayon 547 hits.
Hrayon 2 hits.
Irayon 20 hits.
Jrayon 22 hits.
Krayon 12300 hits.
Lrayon 5 hits.
Mrayon 8 hits.
Nrayon 5 hits.
Orayon 56 hits.
Prayon 2750 hits.
Rrayon 4770 hits.
Srayon 52 hits.
Trayon 603 hits.
Urayon 2 hits.
Vrayon 5 hits.
Xrayon 17 hits.
Yrayon 10 hits.
Zrayon 2 hits.
At this time Crayon Vertriebs has not named any defendants using Qrayon 0 hits, Wrayon 0 hits, or rayon 467,000 hits. Crayon Vertriebs reserves the right to name additional defendants in the future.
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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$ :-)
Although this is more or less good news, I've been wondering why the majority of SuSE news posted is negative (e.g. New Financing And Fewer Staff @ SuSE, IBM And Intel Help Rescue SuSE From Insolvency, SuSE Announces More Layoffs, SuSE Lays Off (Most) U.S. Staff (Updated)), while releases 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 of their distro have been ignored. Check it out. I know at least one person submitted the 7.2 and 7.3 releases.
Really? Who will Crayon be after next?
German footballer Stefan Kuntz?
--
(if you're still looking for the point, it was back there, in the post. </sig>)
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.
It's my understanding that you actually can. I don't believe you could use the distinctive Coca-Cola logo, or an image of a Coke can to distribute your product, however. On the other hand, IANAL, and Coke has lots of them.
with partnership with B® and C® have formed® a new ecommerce company whose vision is to bring whatever to wherever all around® the planet with unlimited® capacity. This meld®ing of giants has the new and original name of D®
Our business plan is generate revenue by suing anyone and® everything that has violated® our cherished® and world® reconigzed® trad®emark.
For example the online forum Slashd®ot. If you will notice the third® from last letter you will see our trad®emark is once again used® without out our consent and you can be sure our lawyers are stand®ing by to d®ishout our creamy brand® of messed® up justice on the bagel that is the internet.
Once we have generated® enough revenue we will commence with bringing unlimited® broad®band® access that is afford®able to everyone, be they eskimo or aborigine. Although I will ad®mit we haven't a clue how we're going to pull it off.
D® and d® are registared® trad®emarks of D® Ecommerece®. B® and C® are registared® trad®emarks used with permission. Any other letter of the english alphabet that is owned® by another company we are a small startup and it isn't worth it to come after us.
>
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.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
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.
Well, I'm not sure that "common english words" really applies when in Germany - given that German is the primary language spoken over there... :)
The part I don't understand about this whole saga is why SuSE? It's not "their" application, it's just in their distribution. Hell, thechnically, they aren't even selling it (they can't because of the GPL). They are just putting it on a CD and in a box for us. What about RedHat or Mandrake? Are they goning to have to brave these same elements?
:-\
Now, I understand that RH and MDK are not German companies and would be out of Crayon's "jurisdiction". Sooooo... what then about KDE? Granted KDE isn't a real "company", nor all all the hackers that are apart of KDE residing in Germany, but KDE is indeed (losely) based in Germany. Are they going to have to change it's name AGAIN?
P.S. Sorry for bad spelling, I haven't had coffee yet...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Also, SuSE certainly does sell SuSE. They can't prevent other people from copying/selling/whatever the GPL'ed parts of the distribution, but there is no restriction in GPL about selling GPLed software, in fact it is explicitly permitted.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Well... The products are more like collections of comic art, 3D art cliparts and stuff like that. They don't claim to make state-of-the-art software. Maybe they have coded a own proprietary viewer, but their main stream of revenue is in the graphic collection stuff.
+++ath0
The German company "Crayon" probably decided that SuSE was small-potatos and that there are other companies that might have more money to extort.
"...app called Krayon, listed in the start menu but no longer supplied..."
The what menu now??
(I know, I know, off topic, blah, blah - sue me.)
sic transit gloria mundi
IANAL
The German company Crayon doesn't make crayons. The word crayon when referring to crayons is a generic term. Crayola crayons are trademarked.
Trademark law frequently permits trademarking generic terms when they refer to unusual uses of those terms. As an example, think of Microsoft Windows. Even if trademark law didn't permit such trademarking, the German word for crayon isn't "crayon"--it's "zeichenstift" according to babelfish. I'm sure there are US companies that have trademarked words that would be generic in other languages, so it should stand to reason that German law permits trademarking of foreign words that would be generic in their native languages.
Unfortunately, the real problem seems to be with the German court system permitting potentially-disastrous injunctions to be granted on the flimsiest of evidence or without real justification. The German company Crayon should be required to show that failure to grant the injunction would result in serious and irreparable harm before being granted the injunction. It's clear that the injunction was granted on flimsy grounds and shouldn't have been granted in the first place.
"a German company called "Crayon" that claims that the KDE app Krayon violates their trademark."
If only Seymor was still around to first claim prior art and then sue for them violating the trademarks on the power buttons for his super computers.
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.
crayon is the french word for pen. I thought normal words were not able to be trademarked. Even though it is in another language, it's still a normal word.
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That's how I've always heard it explained. I was confused about it back around the time that I was 12, and was told at that time that words couldn't be trademarked to mean anything like what they really meant. So Crayolla was trademarked, and crayon was just was a crayon was. Then I asked about Kleenex(tm) (or did I ask about kleenex?).
I'd never even heard the term facial tissue.
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.