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BitTorrent to Sue Over Trademark
joe 155 writes "The people at BitTorrent are to begin to
protect their rights through lawsuits if necessary: "The company will set the lawyers on anyone using the BitTorrent name, and trademark, if they are using it to distribute spyware or adware" They also plan to put into action a system where by people will have to pay a licence fee to use the name in the hope of cutting down on adware distribution."
Wont this just hurt the makers of Free/OSS software? They're the ones who can't afford this type of thing. The adware people are the ones making money, and as such, can pay the fee.
Bram Cohen obviously has the right to protect the name: the software is open source, the name is not. But more than that, he's protecting the reputation behind that name. He's not attacking the coders of Azureus, or even tracker-websites like UnrealTorrents that use part of the trademark in their name. No, he's going for people using his trademark maliciously...attacking spyware in the way that is easiest and best for him. Certainly this stirs more pots than just me running AdAware on my Windows box, no?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Then people will stop calling it BitTorrent ... end of story.
Yes, I think that's kindof the idea.
Liability, and all that.
If it's a symbolic fee (say $1), somebody will probably be willing to cough it up for whatever the open source client is.
On the other hand, it will require everybody using it to be registered with BitTorrent!
If the registry requires the registrees to specify the purpose of using the name, they now have legally agreed not to use the name for any other purposes. Since "distributing adware/spyware" is obviously not an acceptible description, this will make those companies very easy to sue.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
For those who have a hard time grasping this concept, here's an analogy:
Imagine someone took Firefox, repackaged it as "Firefox Plus" with lots of adware/spyware, and Googlebombed their site so that it was the first result for "Firefox".
That's what's happening right now with BitTorrent. People are writing/repackaging BT clients with adware installers and doing their best to push them to the top of search engines. That way they get novice users who don't know any better to install their crap product. Then the novice user says "BitTorrent sucks, all it did was install adware on my PC and run like crap." It's directly harming BitTorrent's trademark, and they *should* be going after these creeps.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
> Bram Cohen obviously has the right to protect the name: the software is open source, the name is not.
No. This is an example of a greater pattern of abuse that needs to be addressed soon, especially with GPL3 set to enshine it as acceptable practice.
What I'm talking about is this: Developer(s) toil away and produce Free Software. Software becomes popular. Developers suddenly file a trademark and begin to monitize it. See Linux(tm), Firefox(tm) and now BitTorrent(tm). Granted Linux isn't being heavily monitized YET but the shots have already went across the bow. Firefox has already told me to change the name in my RHEL rebuild. See a pattern? The problem is that the package is only known by its name, which until recently was freely usable so nobody has even given any thought what else to call it. Calling everything "The package formerly known as foo..." just doesn't scale.
I propose we forbid this practice. If commercial interests need a trademark that is understandable, but they should undertake the expense of focus groups to pick a new name and the PR to popularize it. This is especially important with BitTorrent since it is not just the name of a client but also the name of the protocol. So sorry Bram, you are a genius but you are wrong on this one. Pick a new trademark for your client or even new forked version of the protocol you want to lock up in an "IP" box.
Democrat delenda est
Ummm, this is wrong. For brands that are sufficiently strong, you can't use their name for anything. There are lots of factors to take into account, but you picked some particularly strong trademarks which make your example incorrect. This is because: imagine I start producing pajamas that say Coca-Cola on them. Even though Coca-Cola is a soft drink company, their trademark is so strong that if I made Coca-Cola pajamas somebody could perfectly reasonably think that the soft drink company distributed those pajamas. Because confusion is likely, my use of the trademark is illegal even though the goods are different. This is called "dilution" of a trademark.
BitTorrent doesn't have the strength Coca-Cola does, but it does have some things on it's side--for example the name is quite arbitrary, well known amongst the same type of people that would use these other "BiTorrent" things, and most of all *the impostors were intentionally trying to make money off BiTorrent's good name.*