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GNOME Project Seeks Donations For Trademark Battle With Groupon

Posted by timothy on from the how-similar-how-confusing? dept.

Drinking Bleach writes Groupon has released a tablet-based point of sale system called Gnome, despite the well-known desktop environment's existence and trademark status. This is also not without Groupon's internal knowledge of the GNOME project; they were contacted about the infringement and flatly refused to change the name of their own product, in addition to filing many new trademark applications for theirs. The GNOME project is seeking donations to help them in a legal battle against these trademark applications, and to get Groupon to stop using their name. They are seeking at least $80,000 to challenge a first set of ten trademark applications from Groupon, out of 28 applications that have been filed.

3 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. How is their infringment? by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 5, Informative

    How would this be infringement? GNOME's trademark lists only the following goods and services:

    Downloadable computer software tools and libraries used for the development of other software applications; downloadable computer software development tools; downloadable computer software for creating and managing a computer desktop; downloadable computer software for use as a graphical user interface; downloadable computer software for word processing, database management, and use as a spreadsheet

    None of which this tablet system falls under other since this isn't "downloadable computer software". And:

    Computer software development; computer software design; computer programming for others; technical consulting services in the field of computer software; licensing of intellectual property

    Nor this.

    I know this will not be popular of me to say, but this looks like IP trolling.

  2. Re:Why feed the lawyers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    GNOME (the desktop environment) has been used as the point-of-sale operating system on cash registers at Lowe's Home Improvement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowe%27s) since the early 2000's. You can still walk around their stores and see Gnome 1.x with Enlightenment as its window manager on their _cash registers_ in 2014. That alone should be grounds for the GNOME Project's case.

  3. GNOME stands for by tepples · · Score: 5, Informative

    Originally GNU Network Object Model Environment, but I think this has been deemphasized since at least 2.0.