Slashdot Mirror
Fluke Donates Multimeters To SparkFun As Goodwill Gesture
Actually, I do RTFA writes "We recently heard about the confiscation of a delivery of multimeters to SparkFun for infringing on Fluke's trademark. One common thread in the discussions was the theme that Fluke should have let that shipment through as a goodwill gesture to SparkFun and the Maker community. Well, Fluke did one better. They announced they were sending more than $30k worth of official multimeters to SparkFun for them to do whatever they want with. SparkFun is most likely going to give them away. A great example of win-win-win?"
Fluke moves from villain to hero.
$30K is cheap for good PR.
Sparkfun is trying to divert at least some of the meters to other countries, where the Fluke trademark does not apply.
If you believe fluke's statement on the matter (personally I do), they didn't initiate this whole mess.
Their trademark, which is for "multimeter with yellow border", which they essentially stole from over 20 years of common publicly-available usage during which Fluke's own multimeters were typically grey?
As the article notes, SparkFun isn't about to try to resell these guys, so SparkFun is still out their entire shipment. What would have been a lot more meaningful of Fluke to do would be to cancel the trademark. That being said, I love Fluke multimeters. Five years of physics labs really made me believe their unofficial motto, "If it works, it's a Fluke."
Why should they cancel their trademark? In what world is that even remotely the right thing to do here?
The slashdot community is hilarious sometimes.
The Ars Technica article notes that the shipment of meters from Fluke exceeds the value of the original dodgy multimeters.
Used to be that you trademarked your logo and your model-name. But trademarking your colors, shapes, etc. is ridiculous. How is this different from Toyota AND Honda selling yellow cars? If it looks like a Fluke, and I pick it up and see SparkFun on it, I think, "Heh, they copied Fluke's design". It's not disingenuous. They're selling an inferior product for a much smaller price to people who don't need a $3000 Fluke meter to check their robot's power relay. They're not labeling it or branding it as a Fluke. How does this harm Fluke's IP?
The cheep meters have more than a passing resemblance to Fluke ones, to the point that someone could actually pick one up and expect Fluke quality and safety, in the right environment.
The slashdot community is hilarious sometimes.
Here's the way it works around here:
If I produce software, I want to get paid for it. If someone else produces software, I'll steal it.
When I make a product, no one else can make anything like it. When someone else makes a product like someone else, they're free to rip off the design because you can't copyright or trademark that shit.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Trademarking a color combination and JUST that it's BS.
It is bullshit to say this is only about the color combination. The knockoff ones look exactly like Fluke devices, and it is hardly accidental. Your argument makes it seem that some good faith is involved on the part of the manufacturer of the fake Fluke meters, and that the violation is trivial, but that is simply not the case.
Sometimes I can't tell if these posts or trolls or not. Why should anyone develop any product if someone else can just clone it and sell it cheaper? While I think copyright laws as they are, are completely nuts, there has to be something to protect against straight up physical counterfeiting.
I'm looking at a digital multimeter from Radio Shack that I bought about 5 years ago when they closed a store near me. It sure looks like the same shade of yellow...
I am Homer of Borg, resistance is - Ooo Donuts!
They didn't.. insofar as Fluke reps standing at ports waiting for a multimeter to pass by their eyes and go "Whoa, Nelly!" - or even getting a call in advance telling them that a shipment of DMMs was found that may or may not infringe.
They did... insofar as Fluke having registered for the trade dress in the first place.
They didn't... insofar as cheap knockoffs trying to copy Fluke's looks - regardless of intent there, Fluke rather they didn't - and since asking nicely tends not to work, trade dress it is.
A lot of people seem to have missed the issue in the original story anyway (even if it may have come across as an attack against Fluke based on e.g. the title).
SparkFun doesn't really mind Fluke's trade dress (other than believing it to be overly broad - they themselves deem the old SFE DMM's border to be more of an orange..). What they mind is the inflexibility of the system once you're confronted with such an issue. For example, SFE didn't appear to have any way to tell CBP that they believed the borders to be orange and thus not even run afoul of the trade dress to begin with and enter e.g. arbitration with either the CBP or with Fluke. There's also the matter of how the product gets destroyed, with only a quoted price per hour - but no indication of how long it would take. Responsible destruction would take a very long time, a shredder should take less than 30 minutes; either could easily be possible for the price cited. Then there's the whole option of 'either ship them away or have them destroyed' in the first place; No "you can store them here and adjust the product so it no longer infringes", and even if you could adjust them, the period in which you have to make that decision is rather short.
While it's easy enough to say that SFE should have done better in figuring out this could occur beforehand, that doesn't help once the issue does arise.
Some will shrug that off and say "well I guess if you have to learn the hard way...", others will contemplate the bureaucracy.
Note that this is pretty much a separate issue from whether or not the color combo should be something that you can get a trade mark/dress on in the first place, which most people focused on (next to the "if you copy a popular brand, you oughtta know this can happen" discussion).
So, SparkFun, a company in the business of selling multimeters, is now being gifted a large number of its competitors superior product. How is this a good thing? They've still lost a ton of money on their own shipment, and can't even give away the Fluke meters without likely reducing the demand for their own product, and probably making their product look bad in comparison as well. Maybe they could sell them to try to recoup some of their losses, but that risks damaging their public image.
Unless they can manage some seriously good PR spin, this looks to me kind of like SparkFun is receiving a very polite and well-spoken slap in the face by Fluke.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
To be clear, I mean specifically the "multimeter with a yellow border = Fluke" trademark. As plenty of people in comments to the previous article noted, yellow is the natural color for a safety device.
In other words, a fluke.
You forgot the part where it is appropriate to go to a grocery store, determine for yourself how much the goods on the shelves should cost, and leave that dollar amount on the shelf in lieu of paying what the grocer is asking.
But those bastards better not abuse the licensing terms on my software.
Next week, order some Chinese cars that look suspiciously like Bugatti Veyrons.
I think a lot of the worst hypocrisies come from different people speaking up at different times. You'll rarely catch one individual being quite so blatant about it.
That said, there are also a lot of individuals who write software and grumble that their bosses don't give it away, not realizing that if they did, they'd be out of a job. Many are counting on the fact that their software is specialized, such that nobody else would particularly want it, and can smugly believe their jobs to be safe while the people who write software with wide appeal (games, infrastructure) would have the same safety.
A kid with a decent $15 multimeter is way ahead of one with no meter at all. There is nothing wrong with cheap DMMs, as long as their limitations are understood. I have some kit Elenco DMMs for about $15 that are useful in many circumstances. I also have very good bench DMMs by Fluke and Tek. And middle of the road handheld 4.5 digit DMMs. All have their place. Any one of them is infinitely superior to nothing.
I always figured that the yellow multimeter was so that you could find it easily. People who use multimeters often use them in places that are dark, cramped, or dirty. Making the case bright yellow just keeps you from misplacing an expensive piece of portable test equipment.
What would have been a lot more meaningful of Fluke to do would be to cancel the trademark.
I wonder if it should have been granted in the first place. Yellow rubber meter holders existed far before 2000 when this color trademark was granted. Which means that Fluke may have not been entitled to it in the first place. Maybe the fine legal minds on Slashdot can help explain it to me.
I understand Fluke's desperation at wanting to stop low cost meters from undercutting their business, but let's face it, China has been undercutting everyone's business. I don't see what makes them so special to avoid it other than making better products, certainly not through a yellow rubber holder that's been used since nearly the beginning of digital meters.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Honestly, those things were POS anyways. Cheap meters are a safety hazard and potentially lethal. Yes. lethal.
They're constructed poorly, have little to no input protection and have unpredictable overload behavior. Use them for anything more than low voltage measurements and you're putting your life in danger.
Flukes, Agilent (err, Keysight), etc., they all construct their meters with protection. You can use the ohms scale and connect it to live mains voltage (250V+) and nothing happens. Do it on a cheap meter and you'll see explosions, maybe with shrapnel.
And yeah, maybe those cheap meters read 1000V or something - apply 1000V to them and they'll explode because they aren't rated to. Hell, the creepage and spacing of conductors probably isn't even sufficient.
If you're lucky, a cheap meter will burn out on you. If not, it'll explode in your hands.
The real waste is that someone commissioned the building of those crappy meters in the first place.
Good meters have HRC (high-rupture capacity) fuses, where even overloaded badly they'll blow without breaking, the cases seal together with a tongue-and-groove to prevent exploding components from rupturing the case, thicker plastic to withstand explosions etc. And of course, isolation slots to prevent voltages from jumping gaps.
I dabble in electronics, Fluke is a very nice MultiMeter. TheRegnirps claimed on sparkfun when Fluke was being seen in a bad light: " I used to have a high voltage supply (I used for calibrating photomultipliers) from Fluke, a 5kV supply with rotary switches all the way down to 0.1 volt steps and it was dead on. This kind of thing is not easy. "
A separate post not a reply, even stole a quote; in hopes others follow Flukes example as well as an attaboy to Fluke.
There's a famous HBS case study on Dewalt. Black & Decker bought the brand (which was at that point restricted to woodworking tools), and used it to rebrand their Black & Decker professional line. They chose yellow/black as a color scheme since it was familar both from the "safety sign/tape" schema and because blue was Makita and red was Skil or Hilti or probably a few others as well, so the black/yellow would stand out. They didn't change the actual tools (which got good ratings when people didn't see the B&D branding on them, but construction pros didn't want to bring something to the job site that was the same brand as their popcorn popper), just change the color and name. Market share went up about 8-fold in a year.
What about five years down the line when neither of them are in their retail packaging and all of the logos have worn off the cheapo imitation. Are you too dumb to use a meter when you pick this up off of a bench and trust that it can actually handle 600 V without bursting into flames?
Without the SparkFun logo, anyone who has used a Fluke would look at the meter and say that it's a Fluke. This case has everything to do with trade dress:
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Ground wires are green and yellow only after you check them out. I have seen more than one hot green wire. Have also seen where all four wires coming out of the conduit and into a small (10hp) motor were black, no tags or colored tape either.
Passionately Indifferent
This doesn't completely make sense (although I also believe Fluke didn't actively initiate the action).
How would the Customs/Border "Protection" guys know whether or not SparkFun had a license from Fluke? Someone at CBP must have suspected something, and made a few phone calls asking questions first. They can't (legally) just claim Trademark/dress infraction and block passage because some random employee had a feeling in his gut.
They must have contacted someone (either SparkFun or Fluke) who said SparkFun didn't have permission and that the device was infringing. The CBP guy wouldn't have just pulled up the Trademark/dress filing and in his 'expert' capacity to interpret this decided to block the shipment without verifying the current ownership/licensee chain.
If it was SparkFun that sent a poorly written response and got themselves into trouble, then so be it. But, it may have been Fluke answering a simple question without thinking about the final outcome of their action.
Think of this like having the cops turn up at your door asking if you owned the car parked across your driveway, and you simply answer no and close the door. Then later that day your daughter's boyfriend complains that you had his car towed.
If this isn't a prime example of why IP laws need to be tossed into the garbage i don't know what is.
Sure, its great Fluke stepped up the plate to help out, but this should have never been an issue in the first place. It's a *COLOR* ... geesh
---- Booth was a patriot ----