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Google "Loses" Gmail in Europe
Hippie Hippie Shake writes to mention that Google has just lost the right to use the name 'Gmail' in Europe, according to the EU. "Daniel Giersch, a German-born 32-year old entrepreneur, has just announced that his company received a positive ruling last week from the Harmonization Office supporting his claim that "Gmail" and his own "G-mail" are confusingly similar. G-mail is a German service that provides a "gmail.de" email address, but also allows for a sort of "hybrid mail" system in which documents can be sent electronically, printed out by the company, and delivered in paper format to local addresses." It looks like "Google Mail" from here on out, at least in the Old Country."
Daniel Giersch, a German-born 32-year old entrepreneur, has just announced that his company received a positive ruling last week from the Harmonization Office supporting his claim that "Gmail" and his own "G-mail" are confusingly similar.
That's not something a few hundred million dollars can't fix.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
...because he legitimately had use of the G-mail term in advance. But if he's smart, he'll either capitalize on the name recognition and make a really nice mail portal system, or sell to Google. Providing a somehow "inferior" product under that name might not work out so well in the long run.
"Daniel Giersch, a German-born 32-year old entrepreneur, has just announced that his company received a positive ruling last week from the Harmonization Office supporting his claim that "Gmail" and his own "G-mail" are confusingly similar.
So when his rather stupid venture tanks (several people have tried his kind of service before), he can at least get some money for the domain name.
doubt it. Something tells me google isn't the company to reach out twice.
I mean yeah, it's good that the guy has character and defends his creation [G-mail that is]. But I dunno, if google wanted to give me 250K for libtom.org I'd be finding a pen.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
It's kind of funny. If this had been a big corporation taking the name away from a little guy everyone would be up in arms about how unjust this practice is.
Only if the little guy registered his domain first.
Unfortunately, in this case, denic.de isn't giving enough info in their whois lookups to tell when gmail.de was registered.
So it's hard to know who to root for.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
That's not funny; it's sad. Intellectual property rights are demonized by those who don't understand them. While there are certainly intelligent arguments to be made about the scope of trademark, patent, copyright, trade secret, and antitrust law, you won't find it here.
I got my gmail.com address in the UK before all this trouble, and if I send an invite to myself and create a mail account for someone I can still get them gmail.com addresses.
I don't know why this is, but it's very handy.
What's really funny is that it can't really stand for (G)erman- Mail, as if it was tailored to actual Germans, wouldn't it be (D)eutschland-Mail?
The above post reads like one of those spams that has autogenerated paragraphs of text pasted together from news reports, Great Expectations and the U.S. Constitution.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com