GNOME Project Seeks Donations For Trademark Battle With Groupon

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.

Comments

Re:Trademark breadth

[ShadowRangerRIT]

How does that make sense? The risk of brand theft is higher with a more widely recognized product. If I introduce Coca Cola branded headphones (to name one of the few things Coca Cola doesn't stick their name on yet AFAIK), my sales would be boosted by the brand name association Coca Cola built, not the merits of my product. That's why trademark protections exist; to avoid borrowing/stealing/damaging (if the product sucks) other companies' reputations unfairly.

Re:If this were ten years ago, I would have

[nadaou]

Hear hear. If one of the biggest and best known names in the FOSS world can't defend themselves from something so blatant it just encourages other big corporations from abusing smaller groups.

Red hat, we're looking at you to step up here.

The Systemd and GNOME3 toxic manouvers are irrelevant.