Red Hat Founder Offers Help in Apple vs.Tiger Lawsuit

Art Vanderlay writes "Robert F. Young, a founder of Linux distributor Red Hat and now owner of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats Canadian football team, has offered Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs a quick way out of a lawsuit by TigerDirect over the latest version of Tiger. According to the Globe and Mail, Mr. Young has offered to license the Hamilton Tiger-Cats' historical use of the word Tiger to Apple free of charge. The Hamilton Tiger-Cats have been around since 1869. '136 years ago we were called The Tigers,' Mr. Young said. 'If anyone owns the exclusive rights to the word tiger with that much history and tradition, it's gotta be us.'"

Comments

Trademarks

[FiReaNGeL]

Trademarking of common words is just... stupid.

You can't have these kind of issues with a made-up name like Coca-Cola, right?

Apple, Tiger, Windows, whats next? Imagination isn't a prerequisite anymore in marketing, it seems.

Red Hat getting in on the PR

[winkydink]

Nothing more.

While Tiger Direct has a (if somewhat sleazy) case, there's little confusion between a football team and computer sw. This is just Red Hat attempting to cash in on the PR surrounding this while looking like a good guy.

hmph

[namekuseijin]

if such companies are so eager to preserve a stupid trademark, why don't they do something to preserve their symbol: the tiger? He's in the brink of extinction, ya know?

Re:It won't work...

[mrchaotica]

If Apple would have added more to the name like TigerMAC, then I think they would have a better chance.

What, something like "Mac OS X Tiger"?

Re:From one hole to another?

[KillerDeathRobot]

Man, am I the only one that gets that this whole thing is a joke? It's obvious that this trademark would not help Apple at all. This whole thing is a joke pointing out how dumb Tiger Direct's suit is. As a bonus it gets Redhat some free PR.