Arduino Dispute Reaches Out To Distributors

szczys writes Two companies are claiming ownership of the Arduino Trademark. The most recent development in this sad state of affairs is a letter from Arduino SRL to long-time Distributors of Arduino products. SRL is claiming they are the real Arduino, but there are some tasty tidbits including a Q/A section with some peculiar answers. From the article: "In short, Arduino LLC has been working on developing the Arduino platform, software, and community while Smart Projects / Arduino SRL was the major official producer of the hardware for most boards. Both are claiming to 'be' Arduino, and going after each other in court. So it’s not strange that Arduino SRL would like to try to keep its hold on the distribution channels."

Comments

Re:Should be simple

[Half-pint HAL]

From TFA:

It turns out that Smart Projects had trademarked the Arduino brand in Italy in December 2008, before Arduino LLC got around to filing in April 2009 in the USA.

So... what's to discuss. I don't think there's a law against being a complete asshole, so smart projects wins.

You don't "trademark" things -- you register a trademark. Registration is not strictly necessary in most jurisdictions -- as long as you are actively using the branding, it is automatically considered your trademark. Order of registration only matters if you're talking about two commercial entities independently coming up with the same brand. Here we have two entities with an existing contractual relationship. Smart Projects therefore was not ignorant of the informal body that later became Arduino LLC. Who initiated the contract and who came up with the name? What did the original contract say about the name? Clearly the initial contracts were poorly drafted, or there would be a clear answer, and we wouldn't be having this conversation!!

Reminds me of Visicalc

[Anonymous Coward]

After Visicalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, gave businessmen a reason to buy personal computers (specifically Apple II's), a nasty round of litigation ensued between the company that developed the software (Software Arts) and the company that productized the software (Visicorp, nee Personal Software). Both companies were dragged down as Mitch Kapor and Lotus Development came out with the hit product on the new IBM PC.

The sage is now a staple of business school curricula on what not to do, I think.

http://www.bricklin.com/history/saiend.htm

Re: marketting

[Spirilis]

Basically my perspective on this- Arduino LLC is delivering real value by developing the open-source IDE along with an API and the capability to provide 3rd party hardware support easily in their IDE. (Recent example: http://hackaday.com/2015/03/28/arduino-ide-support-for-the-esp8266/ )

Folks might not like the IDE, but the API provides a nice platform for obtaining working code for interfacing with lots of hardware. Arduino LLC's work is partly defining and expanding that API & framework.

Arduino SRL makes crappy hardware. Their market is now quite commoditized. I will be donating to Arduino LLC soon to make my point.