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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."
IIRC a Trademark is worthless unless it is defended. Defence against people misusing it is necessary for them to have the trademark upheld in the first place.
I can't agree with this move.
BitTorrent is not *just* the name of the software package (and I would agree with Bram on going after people who simply try to trade off the fame of the package), but also the name of the protocol, which many other packages than his own implement and have for some time. That may be unfortunate, but such is life. That protocol achieved public awareness by the number of servents available.
My guess is that "BitTorrent" is no longer trademarkable, given the amount of time that it has been in common use -- common use for a period of time without challenges does negate trademarks. However, the sorts of hobbyist programmers writing BitTorrent clients aren't the sorts who are going to mount a legal fight.
One possible fix would be doing what happened with trampolines. "Trampoline" with a capital "T" is trademarked, but "trampoline" simply refers to the device itself. Perhaps "BitTorrent" could refer to the software package, and "bittorrent" to the protocol. Still, I doubt that Bram would settle for this.
I really hope that people settle on another name for it (preferably with the same "bt" abbreviation) that is the same, instead of the name fragmenting into eight zillion different names (I remember Sony calling Firewire "iLink"...). "ByteTorrent?"
No matter what, it's a frusterating situation, that's for certain.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Opera announced an agreement with BitTorrent the other day. Opera first included BitTorrent in 8.02 and then 8.10 (which was never officially released), but then went quiet about it. Now BitTorrent showed up again in Opera 9.0 Preview 2. Was this because BitTorrent approached Opera and wanted them to pay up? Is Opera the first to pay BitTorrent Inc. for the "privilege" of using the trademark?
Blizzard was one of the first large companies to use bittorrent to distribute game patches.
However, their patches include warden which is technically spyware. Have they already paid a license fee or are they in for trouble from the bittorrent people?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
That's not what the previous poster asked. He asked if people have to pick a different brand name. For example, let's say that somebody wants to repackage the GPL portions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in order to make their own very similar distribution called Pink Box Linux. Pink Box Linux contains many programs with trademarked names. Is PBL required to rename every one of those trademarked programs? We all agree that it's allowed to, but does it have to?
Second question: is that desirable?