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Imminent Mandrake Name Change?
An anonymous reader writes "Mandrakesoft has lost a trial
and has been condemned to change its name and its logo"
The article is in French, but it says that King Syndicates owns a trademark on Mandrake the Magician.
Update MandrakeSoft can use the logo during appeals, which may take up to 3 years. You can now read their official statement on the ruling.
I thought copyrights usually only worked if the two items were in the same field. How is anyone going to get Mandrake Linux confused with some crappy comic strip magician?
How about 'mandragora' as a replacement for 'mandrake'? According to dictionary.com, mandragora is the Old English version of mandrake. A Google search for "Mandragora the Magician" returned no hits, so it should be safe.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Bringing up Mozilla is interesting. It's a great error that Mandrake can lose a lawsuit over naming themselves after a plant because of a totally unrelated cartoon character that nobody cares about anymore which just happens to be named after the same plant, but Mozilla is powerless to do anything about the computer application "Popzilla" which is clearly trying to capitalize on Mozilla's success by creating confusion in the marketplace.
I'm not sure about France and IANAL, but when I looked at trademarks late last year for a UK or an EU trademark you had to register it under one or more classes, and the trademark would only protect you against products that also fall under those classes. If a product fell under a different class to one you registered, you were not protected.
Software development fell under class 38 or 42 (can't remember which one).
Java gaming nut - http://www.retep.org/ or for the rail http://uktra.in/
I think it just lends support to the recursive-acronym method of naming projects. ;)
If they'd called themseves GAM (GAM ain't Mandrake) would they be having this problem? Or MIN (Mozilla is MIN)? Yeah I didn't think so.