Note that was the date on which the trademark was published - what, if anything, does that say about the date on which it was applied for?
I don't know. But if they were particularly worried about the name they would presumably not have committed to it until they had the trademark in place and defendable.
I suspect the problems here are because they didn't see iTunes as being the huge sucess it has in fact become, and so didn't approach it as a big, strategic move. It was a service they were setting up to support the new fun gadget they were putting on the market only in the USA, not a potential global phenomenon.
So, they did things in a (relatively) casual manner and have been bitten on the backside by unexpected sucess. I find it really hard to feel sorry for them. Just pay the guy, or operate as uk.itunes.com (which is more logical anyway for the UK branch of an international operation).
If he tried to run something on itunes.co.uk which pretended to be iTunes, the only real worry, he'd be guilty of `passing off' and their lawyers would be happy as pigs in shit taking him apart.
[Given that Apple had a way to block this (trademark) ]
How is that a given, when Apple didn't register their trademark until a month after the domain name was registered, and didn't release iTunes 1.0 for another month after *that*?
That they chose not to register the trademark until later is the indication that they didn't consider the name important.
When the product was released is not relevent. It was clearly named long before, and they should have trademarked it in all their important target markets at that point. If they had done that they would not have a problem now.
They were either incredably incompitent, or they decided that the name was not important to them. In either case they should pay the price now.
They registered iTunes.com long before this guy registered iTunes.co.uk
Which would seem to indicate that they didn't want itunes.co.uk. If they want it now, they can pay him whatever he thinks it is worth.
His site was not unrelated. It directly references Apple's iTunes.
Which is evidence for his side of the case. He has a legitimate use for a site called itunes.co.uk -- to talk about iTunes.
Who was first does not really matter, it belongs to Apple.
By what logic? They didn't register it, they didn't trademark the underlying name, they did nothing to in any way indicate ownership or desire for ownership. This was their business decision. They are now trying to avoid the consequences of that decision.
The morally right thing to do is not to Domain-Squat and steal trade secrets.
What trade secrets have been stolen?
[slightly rearanged] iTunes.co.uk has to be UK specific as this would only be fair for local CD music distributors.
In business, this kind of `being fair' is called `operating a cartel'.
Given Apple didn't value the name enough to trademark it, or register it themselves, I don't see they have a (moral) leg to stand on.
Squatting on a pre-existing name (say an author's pen name or an organisation's trading name, or common alias) where the owner plausibly couldn't get in first (as was the case back when the commercialisation of the Web was new) is a Bad Thing.
However, taking a name of a new product which the owner has decided not to get and not to protect seems perfectly fine to me.
Given that Apple had a way to block this (trademark) and didn't, and given that they couldn't be arsed to pay $20, or whatever, to get the domain themselves (this isn't itunes.something.obscure after all, it's the obvious name in one of their main markets), they should have to live with the results of their business decisions.
They'd get more sympathy from me if they had a reason for needing a UK specific domain other than screwing their suckers, er, sorry, I mean customers.
[If everyone knew everything about everyone else, or at least had access to such information, there would be less problems. ]
Name one that would be solved this way.
People would no longer get eyestrain from watching too much TV since they would have to spend all evening, every evening, reading reports on everyone else.:-)
I like people not knowing stuff about me.[...] ex-wives, speeding tickets[...]
Speeding tickets are a matter between you and the people who own the road you were speeding on, and for a public road in a republic that is basicly everyone.
Similarly, if you choose to register your sex life with the state (marriage and divorce) you are choosing to make it a matter of public record, perhaps because you want social approval or perhaps just for tax reasons, so have no reason to gripe if people know about it.
Re:ECON 101 for techies
on
Offshoring IT
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· Score: 1
A lot of lot of the techjobs out there actually require little skills out there.
Good point.
One thing to remember is that if you are not regularly hitting problems which you have to work hard to overcome, you are working below your skill level and so (hopefully) being overpayed for goofing off most of the time. Nice situation, but not a secure one. Be prepared for someone lower skilled, and so cheaper, or a bit of technology to take your job tomorrow.
Of course, being True Nerds, everyone here went for a job just above their skill level where they have to do 3 impossible things before brakfast. Didn't we?
Re:offshoring has it benifits and drawbacks
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 2, Funny
personally i hate calling Compaq and taking to someone in India. I am not trying to be rude but I can't understand them,
I read somewhere (probably The Economist or the BBC News site) that Indian call centers have been teaching their employees idiomatic English (or French or whatever) from the regions they will be serving. Clearly, there has been a technical fault and you have been connected to the desk which usually serves Glasgow.
Re:Outsourcing isn't new at all
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 1
America has a strong cultural bias that looks down upon "low-skill" work
Then why do you play `Hail to the chief' when he walks into the room?
It's possibly copyright infringement, but that is a civil matter.
Anyway, leaking such things is normal procedure for governemnt bodies.
What is interesting is that this just ended up on some obscure web site, when the leakers were presumably hopeing for some ``your lovable government takes steps to protect you from evil computer hackers'' headlines in the weekend media. The fact that this guy thought it interesting enough to put it up presumably means there was none.
While I can't stand this AC, it should be noted that this is the first time he has made a valid point.
Where?
Of his three premises, one is false (China and North Korea don't share a common system of government) and the other two are irrelivant (East and West Germany shared a border and had fought side by side in a war agains the UN, few people thought one was a tanticle of the other during the cold war).
By his logic we should blame Canada for all the actions of the USA and vice-versa, and Britain and France are effectively the same country.
Lots of people felt the same way about nuclear energy in the 40s
There is a difference between not knowing how some effect can be used for some purpose and there not being any duplicatable evidence of an effect at all.
If there is no visible effect from, for instance, passing electricity through paladium, and no theoretical prediction that there should be, then it makes no sense to do any more work into it since there is no more reason to think it might eventually turn up an effect than from passing electricity through iridium or oatmeal through gerbil intestines.
One, you seem to be arguing that the Wrights should not have flown because 1903 technology wasn't capable of supporting scheduled service.
Er, no, I was saying that no one should have tried to set up a scheduled friegt service using clones of the Wright Flyer.
if you are saying we lacked the technology in the 1970's to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon, and to conduct a human mission to Mars in the 1980's, I fundamentally disagree.
Are you imagining creating and supplying a moonbase with a technology which was barely capable of putting 2 men on the moon with supplies to last a few days, at huge cost per flight? As for mars, we still don't know what we'd need to know from the medical end, and that is one of the few areas which has been worked on continuously from then to now. All the hard technology is decades away even from an Appolo style spam in a can mission.
How can research data transmitted by a machine compare with actually being there yourself?
Ever used a microscope?
how much faster we would learn, if we had people there instead
You mean people not using instruments? We'd learn a huge amount that way, honest. If you gather the information through an instrument, why does it matter if the instrument is split in half, and the bit manipulated by a human being is on Earth?
There may be a small benefit in some cases of having a human being driectly manipulate the instrument without time delay, but the cost, compexity and danger of sending someone up there just to do that is not going to be justified until we are orders of magnitude better at everything than we are now. And even then, most of the really intersting places are just off limits to people. Or are you going to volunteer to burn up plunging into the atmosphere of Saturn or spend 10 years in a weird orbit pointing instruments at the Sun or whatever?
You are not talking about curiosity, you said it, you aren't interested in finding anything out, `not a research project'. You are talking about tourism, going there, staying at the Holliday Inn, eating whatever you'd eat at home, taking the same photos every else has before you of things you don't know anything about and flying home.
I'd love to have been an Appolo astronaut, but that is not curiosity. They didn't come back knowing more than when they went. They left some instruments and brought back some rocks so people who didn't go got to learn things. You will not there were no scientists sent to the moon (I think one guy was an ameteur geologist).
You apparently don't think Apollo was "real earth-moon travel".
In the sense that the Wright Flyer was not a real method of air travel. It was a point from which development could begin, but no one was going to start scheduled passenger or freight services using that technology.
You also apparently agree that we had the capability to stay on the Moon, but only failed to do so
No, I said we might have had by now -- ie we were 30 years development away from that point. We are perhaps 20 years away now -- developments in technology have happened for other reasons which would be a help -- plus maybe 5-10 years to go from a standing start to a manned space programme (which could happen in parallel).
As for probes, they are no subsititute for a human presence in space.
I didn't say they were. I said they did a different and more immediatly interesting job.
The exploration of space is not a research venture.
Slashdot Mirror
2) don't open email attachments with your mail client.
So this guy should be punished for not being psychic?
I don't know. But if they were particularly worried about the name they would presumably not have committed to it until they had the trademark in place and defendable.
I suspect the problems here are because they didn't see iTunes as being the huge sucess it has in fact become, and so didn't approach it as a big, strategic move. It was a service they were setting up to support the new fun gadget they were putting on the market only in the USA, not a potential global phenomenon.
So, they did things in a (relatively) casual manner and have been bitten on the backside by unexpected sucess. I find it really hard to feel sorry for them. Just pay the guy, or operate as uk.itunes.com (which is more logical anyway for the UK branch of an international operation).
If he tried to run something on itunes.co.uk which pretended to be iTunes, the only real worry, he'd be guilty of `passing off' and their lawyers would be happy as pigs in shit taking him apart.
Don't be silly. The licencing here is related to content, not to what you call your web site.
How is that a given, when Apple didn't register their trademark until a month after the domain name was registered, and didn't release iTunes 1.0 for another month after *that*?
That they chose not to register the trademark until later is the indication that they didn't consider the name important.
When the product was released is not relevent. It was clearly named long before, and they should have trademarked it in all their important target markets at that point. If they had done that they would not have a problem now.
They were either incredably incompitent, or they decided that the name was not important to them. In either case they should pay the price now.
Which would seem to indicate that they didn't want itunes.co.uk. If they want it now, they can pay him whatever he thinks it is worth.
His site was not unrelated. It directly references Apple's iTunes.
Which is evidence for his side of the case. He has a legitimate use for a site called itunes.co.uk -- to talk about iTunes.
Who was first does not really matter, it belongs to Apple.
By what logic? They didn't register it, they didn't trademark the underlying name, they did nothing to in any way indicate ownership or desire for ownership. This was their business decision. They are now trying to avoid the consequences of that decision.
The morally right thing to do is not to Domain-Squat and steal trade secrets.
What trade secrets have been stolen?
[slightly rearanged] iTunes.co.uk has to be UK specific as this would only be fair for local CD music distributors.
In business, this kind of `being fair' is called `operating a cartel'.
Given Apple didn't value the name enough to trademark it, or register it themselves, I don't see they have a (moral) leg to stand on.
Squatting on a pre-existing name (say an author's pen name or an organisation's trading name, or common alias) where the owner plausibly couldn't get in first (as was the case back when the commercialisation of the Web was new) is a Bad Thing.
However, taking a name of a new product which the owner has decided not to get and not to protect seems perfectly fine to me.
Given that Apple had a way to block this (trademark) and didn't, and given that they couldn't be arsed to pay $20, or whatever, to get the domain themselves (this isn't itunes.something.obscure after all, it's the obvious name in one of their main markets), they should have to live with the results of their business decisions.
They'd get more sympathy from me if they had a reason for needing a UK specific domain other than screwing their suckers, er, sorry, I mean customers.
``We don't know what it is, but it's ours and everyone who has looked at the photo now needs an SCO licence for their brain.''
Name one that would be solved this way.
People would no longer get eyestrain from watching too much TV since they would have to spend all evening, every evening, reading reports on everyone else.:-)
I like people not knowing stuff about me.[...] ex-wives, speeding tickets[...]
Speeding tickets are a matter between you and the people who own the road you were speeding on, and for a public road in a republic that is basicly everyone.
Similarly, if you choose to register your sex life with the state (marriage and divorce) you are choosing to make it a matter of public record, perhaps because you want social approval or perhaps just for tax reasons, so have no reason to gripe if people know about it.
Good point.
One thing to remember is that if you are not regularly hitting problems which you have to work hard to overcome, you are working below your skill level and so (hopefully) being overpayed for goofing off most of the time. Nice situation, but not a secure one. Be prepared for someone lower skilled, and so cheaper, or a bit of technology to take your job tomorrow.
Of course, being True Nerds, everyone here went for a job just above their skill level where they have to do 3 impossible things before brakfast. Didn't we?
I read somewhere (probably The Economist or the BBC News site) that Indian call centers have been teaching their employees idiomatic English (or French or whatever) from the regions they will be serving. Clearly, there has been a technical fault and you have been connected to the desk which usually serves Glasgow.
Then why do you play `Hail to the chief' when he walks into the room?
From the process scheduling code:
Anyone who anyone would care about?
Who'd miss it if it was blown up?
Anyway, leaking such things is normal procedure for governemnt bodies.
What is interesting is that this just ended up on some obscure web site, when the leakers were presumably hopeing for some ``your lovable government takes steps to protect you from evil computer hackers'' headlines in the weekend media. The fact that this guy thought it interesting enough to put it up presumably means there was none.
But for how long?
Actually, come to think of it, perhaps incompitence in a secret po^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhomeland security department is not such a bad thing.
Where?
Of his three premises, one is false (China and North Korea don't share a common system of government) and the other two are irrelivant (East and West Germany shared a border and had fought side by side in a war agains the UN, few people thought one was a tanticle of the other during the cold war).
By his logic we should blame Canada for all the actions of the USA and vice-versa, and Britain and France are effectively the same country.
It's bad enough thunderbird supports such evil at all without making it easy.
There is a difference between not knowing how some effect can be used for some purpose and there not being any duplicatable evidence of an effect at all.
If there is no visible effect from, for instance, passing electricity through paladium, and no theoretical prediction that there should be, then it makes no sense to do any more work into it since there is no more reason to think it might eventually turn up an effect than from passing electricity through iridium or oatmeal through gerbil intestines.
As opposed to reading them the same story 200 times? Or singing the same song with them 1000 times.
Young kids like predidictability in certain things. 99.99% of the whole world is novel to them, so they like having some stability to hang on to.
ObNerd:
Rather like PHBs and Windows actually.
Er, no, I was saying that no one should have tried to set up a scheduled friegt service using clones of the Wright Flyer.
if you are saying we lacked the technology in the 1970's to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon, and to conduct a human mission to Mars in the 1980's, I fundamentally disagree.
Are you imagining creating and supplying a moonbase with a technology which was barely capable of putting 2 men on the moon with supplies to last a few days, at huge cost per flight? As for mars, we still don't know what we'd need to know from the medical end, and that is one of the few areas which has been worked on continuously from then to now. All the hard technology is decades away even from an Appolo style spam in a can mission.
How can research data transmitted by a machine compare with actually being there yourself?
Ever used a microscope? how much faster we would learn, if we had people there instead
You mean people not using instruments? We'd learn a huge amount that way, honest. If you gather the information through an instrument, why does it matter if the instrument is split in half, and the bit manipulated by a human being is on Earth?
There may be a small benefit in some cases of having a human being driectly manipulate the instrument without time delay, but the cost, compexity and danger of sending someone up there just to do that is not going to be justified until we are orders of magnitude better at everything than we are now. And even then, most of the really intersting places are just off limits to people. Or are you going to volunteer to burn up plunging into the atmosphere of Saturn or spend 10 years in a weird orbit pointing instruments at the Sun or whatever?
You are not talking about curiosity, you said it, you aren't interested in finding anything out, `not a research project'. You are talking about tourism, going there, staying at the Holliday Inn, eating whatever you'd eat at home, taking the same photos every else has before you of things you don't know anything about and flying home.
I'd love to have been an Appolo astronaut, but that is not curiosity. They didn't come back knowing more than when they went. They left some instruments and brought back some rocks so people who didn't go got to learn things. You will not there were no scientists sent to the moon (I think one guy was an ameteur geologist).
In the sense that the Wright Flyer was not a real method of air travel. It was a point from which development could begin, but no one was going to start scheduled passenger or freight services using that technology.
You also apparently agree that we had the capability to stay on the Moon, but only failed to do so
No, I said we might have had by now -- ie we were 30 years development away from that point. We are perhaps 20 years away now -- developments in technology have happened for other reasons which would be a help -- plus maybe 5-10 years to go from a standing start to a manned space programme (which could happen in parallel).
As for probes, they are no subsititute for a human presence in space.
I didn't say they were. I said they did a different and more immediatly interesting job.
The exploration of space is not a research venture.
As I said, you show an amazing lack of curiosity.