The standard isn't whether or not well-informed long-time customers would be confused, but whether an average person might be confused.
Lindows and Windows seems to me to be a clear case of infringement, because Lindows was clearly trying to piggyback on Windows' notoriety with the choice of the name. For many people, Windows is synonymous with operating system, and naming a competing product Lindows seeks to bank on some of that. It seems very open-and-shut to me, and I'm not even a major fan of IP claims.
Now, again, regarding whether or not the internet is a market, we have to think about how the masses would perceive it. If I told you to go buy something at Ikea, and you asked where it was, I might say "oh, go to College Park, Maryland" or wherever the nearest location might be. In this case, there is a definite parallel to saying "go [buy/get/sell] it online." To many, if not most, the internet functions much like any other metropolitan market, but its availability is worldwide in scope. I don't really follow the carbon-based life analogy, but that's neither here nor there at the moment. So this becomes an important question that will be answered in coming years.
Getting a trademark on WINDOWS in, say, international class 19, which is for building materials, would be silly, since everyone and their brother would have a claim to such a mark. Getting a mark in this class, 42, for technology services/products, is far less of an obvious claim. Just because a word is in the common language doesn't mean that it's not distinctive in context. Microsoft can't sue a window manufacturer for using their mark, and the world goes on working.
Do you confuse E-mail with Email? They seem the same to me, so why wouldn't Gmail and G-Mail be the same, especially since they have similar functions to e-mail/email/E-Mail/Email.
In US law (no claims about any other country, even though that is indeed at issue here), there are three factors that seem make this a valid claim:
1. The marks themselves are likely to confuse a consumer. Even if marks are quite different, but they may confuse someone because they sound or look similar, then there is a case for infringement. I can't name my carbonated cola Koke, even though two of the four letters in the mark have been altered, because it would clearly be intended to confuse a consumer. Red flag #1.
2. The marks would be used in the same international class--in this case, probably class 42, for scientific and technological services, research, design, computer software development services, etc. So if they're going after the same class of goods, that's another red flag.
3. They are in the same market--in this case, the internet. This is where IP (I know, I know) law gets interesting, because many of these internet-related issues haven't been worked out. While this wouldn't be much of a substantive claim if these were brick-and-mortar services in different cities, many consider the internet to be one market, and therefore a mark can only apply to one internet entity. This is dicey, but I think grounds for a claim of infringement, and a third red flag.
Now, what makes it additionally interesting is that, apparently, neither of these trademarks have been formally registered. They have been applied for, however, so we'll have to see what happens with those applications.
With common-law trademarks (unregistered), they are still protected by law, but only in those markets where they are used and asserted. So if I am in New York City, and I am selling WHAFRO pens, I can't get upset if someone sells WHAFRO pens in Philadelphia unless my mark was registered. If I had also been selling them in Boston and Philadelphia, and someone in Philadelphia started using my mark, I would have a claim. How this shakes out on the internet is, as I said, an unsettled question.
This is actually interesting, but I think Google will actually lose this one if it's pursued.
Nope, you're not crazy. I should have said raritan bay, or whatever that body of water to the south of new york is... the LIS was just first on my mind.
However, as we saw these last weeks, you don't need the eyewall to pass over the city for it to inflict serious damage.
That and Ophelia right now is showing that hurricanes can indeed move in any direction, given the proper [lack of] steering currents and winds.
People used to say those kinds of things about natural phenomenon like lightning striking buildings. Then Ben Franklin (and another guy in Europe simultaneously) invented the lightning rod, and it's been less of an issue since...
It's not about the entire storm, it's primarily about the eyewall/center of circulation, and there is plenty of water leading to DC (the Chesapeake Bay) or New York (Long Island Sound) that would allow a strong hurricane to maintain a large portion of its strength.
That said, the water temperatures during much of the hurricane season (very late summer/early autumn) around those cities is in the mid-70s (F, of course), whereas the temperature in the regions where hurricanes form and strengthen, including that of the Gulf, are in the mid to high 80s and above.
Hurricanes do make it to cities like that-- if I remember correctly, Hurricane Hazel brought 100 mph winds to Philadelphia and caused a substantial bit of distruction there in 1954. The same year, Carol incited sustained winds of between 80-100mph across most of Connecticut after landing in Rhode Island. Nonetheless, these are much less common events than in those areas where the water is warmer, especially the Gulf Coast.
That's irrelevant in this case, certainly. This wasn't a judgment of what the best search engine is, but instead which search engine had more results. This was strictly quantity, and not quality.
TFA notes that queries with greater than 1,000 results were dropped from the survey, because Google and Yahoo both truncate their results to 1,000.
That makes sense, but it does stand to reason (or, at least, to my reason) that these queries that garner large numbers of results could have had a significant impact on the bottom line of the survey.
Those could be the larger sites, where Yahoo is perhaps digging deeper, requesting data from forms, ignoring robots.txt, etc. It could be where they're getting those big claimed numbers of indexed documents.
That doesn't mean that it's okay to forget how to assign possession to words. Please, editors and posters, realize that his name is Torvalds, and when he owns a pen, it's "Linus Torvalds' pen."
Word choice, grammar, and punctuation matter. If you're one of those people saying "I'm a nerd, I don't have to know how to write" then please, spare the rest of us, and don't submit stories to major "news" sites.
Editors who don't catch these things are simply pathetic, and it's inexcusable.
That is, unless we're talking about someone else named Torvald, in which case I move to strike my previous comments.
My town, Warrington, PA, has 15,649 residents (as of 2000, more now), yet it has 64 full-time police officers.
In this suburban Philadelphia town with nothing really interesting about it, there have been seventeen non-traffic crimes in the past year.
We have a "highway patrol unit" with seven cars, but we don't have a highway, just a couple of state routes going through town.
We have four police officers on horses, and they can only patrol a rather small area where there aren't any larger roads. They are an expensive show, I suppose.
We have officers on motorcycles who ride Harley-Davidsons that have aftermarket pipes that are illegal for use by anyone else. They say that their bikes are "precision tuned to allow them to pursue their adversaries." There are plenty of street-legal bikes that would allow that to happen that cost substantially less.
We frequently have seatbelt checks at intersections, even though you can only be ticketed for not wearing a seatbelt in combination with another ticket.
Cops are begging for crimes to make their jobs justified. They will lie through their teeth under oath (I've seen it happen to multiple people), but since they work with the same judge day in and day out, there's no questioning their testimony. You miss a day of work and pay court fees while you're presumed guilty. Your $30 speeding ticket becomes $150 before fees even if you don't go to court, so you can pay an ambulance service fee, even when there was never a question of needing an ambulance.
I'm not afraid of speeders in my area. When speeding is excessive, it's in the neighborhoods/developments, not on the highways. Accidents in the area are relatively rare, and related to someone not paying attention, not stopping at a light, etc. Not speeding.
I'm afraid of the non-traffic crimes that happen in my town. And to handle them, we need no more than five officers or so. We don't need a highway patrol unit. We don't need mounted officers. We don't, and a lot of other towns around us have similar situations.
I want a small crew of cops for our small town, and not a unit that is looking to make money to support their own growth. They don't need growth, they need real crimes, and I don't support the growth of crime. There's no protection in this coverage, and they're not serving anyone except themselves.
Disclaimer: I've never been pulled over nor had an accident, but these are my experiences based on those I know who have, where I have first-hand experience of their "crime" as well as their "trial."
When SOS converts to Componentized Linux in beta 1, mezzo, orchestra, and all of the other components will be available as individual components themselves.
The reason why this is an OS is because these are, in fact, different components that will be designed to work together to provide a cohesive experience, like OS X. GTK/QT will be themed, packages will be done specially for SOS to maximize ease of installation for newbies, and many system/config utilities will be written in orchestra.
It's not just about a desktop, but about a complete UI.
No, if you're talking guns and murders, it would be more like this conversation between a gun salesman and a customer:
Customer: "I'm looking for a gun, can you suggest one?" Salesman: "Okay, well, what do you need to use it for?" Customer: "My wife has been having an affair, and I need to off the bastard who's getting on her." Salesman: "Oh, good, well, I have the perfect choice right over here..."
I didn't expect to RTFA and find that people actually thought it was funny/beneficial.
I mean, it might have been news (or at least interesting) if people were pissed. Then they "rekindled friendships" and all sung campfire songs, and I ceased to care.
In other news, I left my vacuum cleaner in the hallway and my brother stubbed his toe. He was going to be pissed, but decided not to be, so it was all good. He actually thought it was funny eventually. Just so you all know.
Doesn't anyone else get a bit nervous before sending an e-mail to a list and make sure that everything is set up correctly? I mean, I'd at least have glanced at my mailing list's address list seven or eight times (consecutively) before hitting send.
It's one thing if you read like an idiot in a personal message. It's far more damning when you do it en masse. Then again, maybe it's just far more accurate when you do it en masse.
It's amazing how frequently I have these experiences of deja vu while reading Slashdot.
Re:FreeBSD
on
Why FreeBSD
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
FreeBSD is a full OS. I have no idea what you mean by your statement.
I think he is saying that FreeBSD is like Gentoo is like one of those old RadioShake "build your own radio" kits. To him, and to many others, an OS is something that works out of the box to perform common tasks. In other words, it's a largely binary-based distro, rather than ports-based.
After everything has been built, he would consider it an OS, but out of the box, you have to spend quite a bit of time before your box is actually able to fully "operate."
Doesn't seem too unreasonable, though it is a question of semantics.
Oh, sorry, should I have started that post with "Well, I have karma to burn, so..." or ended it by apologizing with "I use linux, and am typing this from linux, so I'm clearly a supporter of the OS"?
okay, linux fans always say stuff about bugs like "they're talking about the distribution, not the kernel! that's not Linux, that's the distribution!"
So let's come to a consensus. Does Windows/Linux include what's on the CD, or just the kernel and drivers included directly in the kernel?
I have a feeling that if there were a driver bug that was in a driver NOT included in the main kernel download, but was still shipped on distro CDs,/. readers would rally to say that this is not a Linux problem, but a driver problem.
why doesn't it mean they're going to sue AOL, Yahoo, etc? I mean, it's not as if MS invented smilies, and it's not as if people weren't making variations on smilies well before MSN/Windows Messenger existed.
I remember using smilies as early as 1990 (could have been earlier).
Slashdot Mirror
The standard isn't whether or not well-informed long-time customers would be confused, but whether an average person might be confused.
Lindows and Windows seems to me to be a clear case of infringement, because Lindows was clearly trying to piggyback on Windows' notoriety with the choice of the name. For many people, Windows is synonymous with operating system, and naming a competing product Lindows seeks to bank on some of that. It seems very open-and-shut to me, and I'm not even a major fan of IP claims.
Now, again, regarding whether or not the internet is a market, we have to think about how the masses would perceive it. If I told you to go buy something at Ikea, and you asked where it was, I might say "oh, go to College Park, Maryland" or wherever the nearest location might be. In this case, there is a definite parallel to saying "go [buy/get/sell] it online." To many, if not most, the internet functions much like any other metropolitan market, but its availability is worldwide in scope. I don't really follow the carbon-based life analogy, but that's neither here nor there at the moment. So this becomes an important question that will be answered in coming years.
Getting a trademark on WINDOWS in, say, international class 19, which is for building materials, would be silly, since everyone and their brother would have a claim to such a mark. Getting a mark in this class, 42, for technology services/products, is far less of an obvious claim. Just because a word is in the common language doesn't mean that it's not distinctive in context. Microsoft can't sue a window manufacturer for using their mark, and the world goes on working.
Do you confuse E-mail with Email? They seem the same to me, so why wouldn't Gmail and G-Mail be the same, especially since they have similar functions to e-mail/email/E-Mail/Email.
In US law (no claims about any other country, even though that is indeed at issue here), there are three factors that seem make this a valid claim:
1. The marks themselves are likely to confuse a consumer. Even if marks are quite different, but they may confuse someone because they sound or look similar, then there is a case for infringement. I can't name my carbonated cola Koke, even though two of the four letters in the mark have been altered, because it would clearly be intended to confuse a consumer. Red flag #1.
2. The marks would be used in the same international class--in this case, probably class 42, for scientific and technological services, research, design, computer software development services, etc. So if they're going after the same class of goods, that's another red flag.
3. They are in the same market--in this case, the internet. This is where IP (I know, I know) law gets interesting, because many of these internet-related issues haven't been worked out. While this wouldn't be much of a substantive claim if these were brick-and-mortar services in different cities, many consider the internet to be one market, and therefore a mark can only apply to one internet entity. This is dicey, but I think grounds for a claim of infringement, and a third red flag.
Now, what makes it additionally interesting is that, apparently, neither of these trademarks have been formally registered. They have been applied for, however, so we'll have to see what happens with those applications.
With common-law trademarks (unregistered), they are still protected by law, but only in those markets where they are used and asserted. So if I am in New York City, and I am selling WHAFRO pens, I can't get upset if someone sells WHAFRO pens in Philadelphia unless my mark was registered. If I had also been selling them in Boston and Philadelphia, and someone in Philadelphia started using my mark, I would have a claim. How this shakes out on the internet is, as I said, an unsettled question.
This is actually interesting, but I think Google will actually lose this one if it's pursued.
google's gmail trademark application status
IRR's application status
Nope, you're not crazy. I should have said raritan bay, or whatever that body of water to the south of new york is... the LIS was just first on my mind.
However, as we saw these last weeks, you don't need the eyewall to pass over the city for it to inflict serious damage.
That and Ophelia right now is showing that hurricanes can indeed move in any direction, given the proper [lack of] steering currents and winds.
People used to say those kinds of things about natural phenomenon like lightning striking buildings. Then Ben Franklin (and another guy in Europe simultaneously) invented the lightning rod, and it's been less of an issue since...
It's not about the entire storm, it's primarily about the eyewall/center of circulation, and there is plenty of water leading to DC (the Chesapeake Bay) or New York (Long Island Sound) that would allow a strong hurricane to maintain a large portion of its strength.
That said, the water temperatures during much of the hurricane season (very late summer/early autumn) around those cities is in the mid-70s (F, of course), whereas the temperature in the regions where hurricanes form and strengthen, including that of the Gulf, are in the mid to high 80s and above.
Hurricanes do make it to cities like that-- if I remember correctly, Hurricane Hazel brought 100 mph winds to Philadelphia and caused a substantial bit of distruction there in 1954. The same year, Carol incited sustained winds of between 80-100mph across most of Connecticut after landing in Rhode Island. Nonetheless, these are much less common events than in those areas where the water is warmer, especially the Gulf Coast.
Don't forget to bring your anti-radiation-suite, the hole in the ozone layer will be bigger by that time too.
While a multi-program software package might help somewhat, a physical suit might be somewhat more effective.
NB: The new Iraqi government must be stabilized before terrorists and factions can destabilize it.
That's irrelevant in this case, certainly. This wasn't a judgment of what the best search engine is, but instead which search engine had more results. This was strictly quantity, and not quality.
TFA notes that queries with greater than 1,000 results were dropped from the survey, because Google and Yahoo both truncate their results to 1,000.
That makes sense, but it does stand to reason (or, at least, to my reason) that these queries that garner large numbers of results could have had a significant impact on the bottom line of the survey.
Those could be the larger sites, where Yahoo is perhaps digging deeper, requesting data from forms, ignoring robots.txt, etc. It could be where they're getting those big claimed numbers of indexed documents.
There's contention as to this rule, and while you're not completely wrong, many would say that you're not completely right, either.
Most people go with what sounds right vs. what sounds awkward:
"The Jones's House" (said "The Joneses House")
"In Jesus' Name" (said "In Jesus Name")
In this case, I'd posit that Torvalds falls into the latter case, and therefore would be Torvalds'
That doesn't mean that it's okay to forget how to assign possession to words. Please, editors and posters, realize that his name is Torvalds, and when he owns a pen, it's "Linus Torvalds' pen."
Word choice, grammar, and punctuation matter. If you're one of those people saying "I'm a nerd, I don't have to know how to write" then please, spare the rest of us, and don't submit stories to major "news" sites.
Editors who don't catch these things are simply pathetic, and it's inexcusable.
That is, unless we're talking about someone else named Torvald, in which case I move to strike my previous comments.
My town, Warrington, PA, has 15,649 residents (as of 2000, more now), yet it has 64 full-time police officers.
In this suburban Philadelphia town with nothing really interesting about it, there have been seventeen non-traffic crimes in the past year.
We have a "highway patrol unit" with seven cars, but we don't have a highway, just a couple of state routes going through town.
We have four police officers on horses, and they can only patrol a rather small area where there aren't any larger roads. They are an expensive show, I suppose.
We have officers on motorcycles who ride Harley-Davidsons that have aftermarket pipes that are illegal for use by anyone else. They say that their bikes are "precision tuned to allow them to pursue their adversaries." There are plenty of street-legal bikes that would allow that to happen that cost substantially less.
We frequently have seatbelt checks at intersections, even though you can only be ticketed for not wearing a seatbelt in combination with another ticket.
Cops are begging for crimes to make their jobs justified. They will lie through their teeth under oath (I've seen it happen to multiple people), but since they work with the same judge day in and day out, there's no questioning their testimony. You miss a day of work and pay court fees while you're presumed guilty. Your $30 speeding ticket becomes $150 before fees even if you don't go to court, so you can pay an ambulance service fee, even when there was never a question of needing an ambulance.
I'm not afraid of speeders in my area. When speeding is excessive, it's in the neighborhoods/developments, not on the highways. Accidents in the area are relatively rare, and related to someone not paying attention, not stopping at a light, etc. Not speeding.
I'm afraid of the non-traffic crimes that happen in my town. And to handle them, we need no more than five officers or so. We don't need a highway patrol unit. We don't need mounted officers. We don't, and a lot of other towns around us have similar situations.
I want a small crew of cops for our small town, and not a unit that is looking to make money to support their own growth. They don't need growth, they need real crimes, and I don't support the growth of crime. There's no protection in this coverage, and they're not serving anyone except themselves.
Disclaimer: I've never been pulled over nor had an accident, but these are my experiences based on those I know who have, where I have first-hand experience of their "crime" as well as their "trial."
When SOS converts to Componentized Linux in beta 1, mezzo, orchestra, and all of the other components will be available as individual components themselves.
The reason why this is an OS is because these are, in fact, different components that will be designed to work together to provide a cohesive experience, like OS X. GTK/QT will be themed, packages will be done specially for SOS to maximize ease of installation for newbies, and many system/config utilities will be written in orchestra.
It's not just about a desktop, but about a complete UI.
No, if you're talking guns and murders, it would be more like this conversation between a gun salesman and a customer:
Customer: "I'm looking for a gun, can you suggest one?"
Salesman: "Okay, well, what do you need to use it for?"
Customer: "My wife has been having an affair, and I need to off the bastard who's getting on her."
Salesman: "Oh, good, well, I have the perfect choice right over here..."
well-played, but I'm a college student and the house is currently a pig-sty.
but, yeah, I like where you're going...
I didn't expect to RTFA and find that people actually thought it was funny/beneficial.
I mean, it might have been news (or at least interesting) if people were pissed. Then they "rekindled friendships" and all sung campfire songs, and I ceased to care.
In other news, I left my vacuum cleaner in the hallway and my brother stubbed his toe. He was going to be pissed, but decided not to be, so it was all good. He actually thought it was funny eventually. Just so you all know.
Doesn't anyone else get a bit nervous before sending an e-mail to a list and make sure that everything is set up correctly? I mean, I'd at least have glanced at my mailing list's address list seven or eight times (consecutively) before hitting send.
It's one thing if you read like an idiot in a personal message. It's far more damning when you do it en masse. Then again, maybe it's just far more accurate when you do it en masse.
don't flaunt your energy-wasting ways, you insensitive clod!
wow, and little did I realize that everyone on slashdot would associate "deja vu" with the Matrix...
It's amazing how frequently I have these experiences of deja vu while reading Slashdot.
FreeBSD is a full OS. I have no idea what you mean by your statement.
I think he is saying that FreeBSD is like Gentoo is like one of those old RadioShake "build your own radio" kits. To him, and to many others, an OS is something that works out of the box to perform common tasks. In other words, it's a largely binary-based distro, rather than ports-based.
After everything has been built, he would consider it an OS, but out of the box, you have to spend quite a bit of time before your box is actually able to fully "operate."
Doesn't seem too unreasonable, though it is a question of semantics.
Oh, sorry, should I have started that post with "Well, I have karma to burn, so..." or ended it by apologizing with "I use linux, and am typing this from linux, so I'm clearly a supporter of the OS"?
okay, linux fans always say stuff about bugs like "they're talking about the distribution, not the kernel! that's not Linux, that's the distribution!"
/. readers would rally to say that this is not a Linux problem, but a driver problem.
So let's come to a consensus. Does Windows/Linux include what's on the CD, or just the kernel and drivers included directly in the kernel?
I have a feeling that if there were a driver bug that was in a driver NOT included in the main kernel download, but was still shipped on distro CDs,
Can't have it both ways...
why doesn't it mean they're going to sue AOL, Yahoo, etc? I mean, it's not as if MS invented smilies, and it's not as if people weren't making variations on smilies well before MSN/Windows Messenger existed.
I remember using smilies as early as 1990 (could have been earlier).
Meta: New Survey Finds No Surprising News Today