I dunno. Say I search for "dell buy", because Dell is the only major OEM I know of and I have friends that use Dell. Surely it would be legitimate for Micron to allow an ad to come up that says "We sell computers at lower-than-Dell prices!"
why? If Micron are so good, why can't they get the same brand awareness as Dell?
More to the point, I think that trademark law shouldn't cover this. The point of a trademark is to ensure that there is no consumer confusion between two brands.
Maybe it should be about that, but it's also to stop people from taking unfair advantage of another company's expense. Whether or not it is unfair is a matter of opinion. As far as I can tell, current legal opinion is that this is unfair, although clearly some people disagree.
Nope. MS have a trademark, and have to defend it, because people do use it as a generic term for a GUI. Now their concerned that the multi-million dollar advertising campaign may be hijacked by some competitor with an axe to grind. And they believe they have a string case even though the word is spelt with a different letter, and the term "Windows" is so generic, that people often refer to any WIMP GUI as windows or variants therof. Many people regularly refer to The X windowing system as X-windows.
Playboy is in a similar situation. They have seen their competiitors take advantage of the money they spent on brand awareness to compete directly. They are obliged to defend their trademark.
Go ahead and try to sell Kleenex tissues and see how quickly you are slapped down.
This is because it's so common that they have to be seen to act to keep hold of their trademark. It helps that it's a whimsical name. If they'd called them "tissue" tissues, they would have had no trademrak at all.
1. For starters, you can't trademark a word in extremely common usage. Look what trouble MS had to go through to get the 'Windows' trademark.
Tell that to Ford - a motor company that's named after a shallow river crossing. Or one of their major rivals, General Motors, which has a purely descriptive name. Come to think of it, most brand names are in common usage. Try calling a movie studio Universal.
A company should not be allowed to appropriate a name in an industry where the name is synonymous or nearly so with the purpose of the product being sold. The common term 'playboy' has always (at least well before the magazine started publishing) been synonymous with women and sex.
Well, dictionary.com says it's a man devoted to the pursuoit of pleasure. The magazine "Playboy", has managed to redefine it so that it's more specifically about sex. The comapny is pretty much responsible for "the creation of the association."
I'm not saying this is the law - I'm saying this is how the law should be (IMO) interepreted based on the logic of trademarks. The original judge did get it right, though perhaps s/he didn't make enough of a distinction.
Why? Playboy has spent a lot of money from the beginning, in becoming a major porn mag. It has made the name its own. If people are searching for Playboy, they most likely mean Playboy magazine, and they are most likely not searching for a hedonist. They are after porn, and since Playboy has spent their money and efforts in making their name succesful, why should some other company be able to take advatntage of this brand recongition to peddle a competitor? Why can't they produce the same level of brand awareness?
Think of P2P as a glorified client version of the web with a decent index - its just giant shareware site, or a shared file server.
It has a disproportionatee quantity of data that cannot be legally downloaded. Most FTP servers would probably be shut down if they were distributing large amounts of copyrighted data without permission.
I love those early episodes. Something that was good from a story point of view, that they didn't do so much later on, was to separate the Doctor from the companions. It made the companions seem to be in much greater danger than if they had The Doctor easily able to save them.
Simple paraphrasing of existing code is not allowed by the GPL.
But is it a copyright violation? After all, the GPL does not have the power to prevent anything that is not disallowed by copyright.
This is pretty similar to the reverse engineering of BIOS. The reverse engineers produced a spec based on the code, and then another team wrote code based on the spec. Could they have done something similar? They may end up with remarkable similar code, and also implementation of functions that are never called. It depends on what the code does, and how it works.
Shhh... Don't say nasty things about open source software. Please repeat this Mantra, "Linux is the perfect OS. Open source software never has any bugs". Or just go for the old "Open source, closed minds. We are Slashdot"
Because Watcom has better support for Windows.libs and dlls?
I think the main reason though, is "Why not?". Why use GCC instead of Watcom? There's no overriding reason not to use Watcom. A lot of people have been using it for a while. Why switch?
Lots of people seem to agree with you, but for some reason, I've never worked out what it is that it doesn't do. Personally, I'm quite fond of it. The main reason for this is I'm a screen space miser, and It's one of the few IDEs that comes with a full screen editor.
Tedhnology simply has to appear to move with the times. Having out of date looking names makes the software appear out of date. This is not what marketing people want, so they follow the conventions. The naming schemes change, but the policy is consistent.
We started off with strings off abbreviations. MS-DOS, VAX, VIC-20. This was probably due to the dominance of IBM, PS/2. Computers were powerful technical devices at the time. They needed a technical sounding name.
When VisiCalc became popular. We had a whole new era of naming conventions (There was an overlap. It takes a couple of years for the convention to become popular). Hence we have products with names that are simply 2 words strung together. Like WordPerfect. In the mid 80's, and early 90's we had computers that were meant to be friendly, so fairly simple relevent names were in vogue, gradually becoming more whimsical., e.g, you know Word is a word processor, can guess lightwave is a ray tracing package, but it would be hard to guess that Opera is a web browser if you didn't already know. Now computers are "cool" accesories, so products have to have suitably cool names. A quick and easy way to do this is to string an initial and a semi-related noun together. Everyone does this. For marketing people, it must be the thing to do.
The publishers do want twice the royalties, but really, what they want is to renegotiate the deals tyhat they agreed to a while ago.
This isn't to say that their argument has no merits. Personally, I think it shouldn't have merit. I'm sure copyright used to be about preoviding an incentive for people to create and publish, so that creative works could be enjoyed by all. Now it seems that the purpose is to prevent people from copying. When did copying become an inherently bad thing to want to do? I fully agree that a creator is entitled to a certain proportion of the profits of his work, and I accept that there are good reasons to want to limit redistribution, but copying, and the ability to copy is a good thing. It's the very basis of the entire media industry.
The record industry seems to be busily generating unscientific reports telling us that file sharing is damaging sales, and seem to be the only ones falling for it. They are busily trying to stop people from copying their stuff, rather than focussing on increasing sales. They seem to believe that if they stop people from copying, their losses will go down, even if the downloaders don't start buying.
The world, especially the RIAA needs to realise the only way to increase their sales is to sell people what they want. People are willing to buy mp3s. It doesn't matter if they share them. If you don't sell them the mp3s, they're going to download them instead, and share those.
Eventually, we may see a standard fro sending listings over the airwaves.
Until that time, there's a viable business model here, as long as anyone can provide the listings using an open standard. The owner of the PVR could then choose a listings provider. The listings provider sets up an ISP, with one of the cheaper "premium" telephone numbers. As long as there are several competing provider companies, the prices should stay low, and the service should be reasonably good.
A lot of Hitchhiker's stuff seem remarkable British. Do you guys actually get half the jokes? I'm pretty sure the Ford Prefect was never an American car, there's no such thing as a Zebra crossing, and you have a completely different type of petty beaurocrat.
If you ever have a chance, take a course in macroeconomics, take it, really interesting stuff.
Most people here, myself included, are more inclined towards Physics, and can't get out of the equilibrium mindset. It's quite hard for Phycisists to grasp some economics basics like, for example, the idea that there's more debt in the world than money.
Same thing. Communism has turned out to be the most dictatorial form of government.
Well, fashism is pretty dictatorial as well. Why does communism seem to get singled out?
And [various other dictatorships] were, for the most part, less deadly than the communists.
At the risk of godwinating this thread, Nazism was responsible for a hell of a lot of deaths, and that only lasted for 12 years, and represented a country with a population of the order of 40 million.
Er.... no. Batista's Cuba was corrupt, but prosperous. Nothing to justify it being turned into a Stalinist hellhole.
Tell that to the poor. Besides, most of the middle east has pretty much the same record on Human rights as Cuba. It's hardly representative of the unique brutality of communist states.
Our fear of Communism was quite justified. Somewhere between 60-80 million people died last century because of collectivist/Communist governments.
This is not the fault of communism. This is the fault of a dictatorial government with total disdain for the people. Many people died in Russia when it was a monarchy. The same goes for pre-revolutionary France, and a large number of faschist dictatorships. None of these were communist. The whole of Europe expanded its empire at the cost of a huge of lives.
People quote these statistics, but never ever make any comparison between these and the pre-communism death rates of the same countries. Could it be that the reason they became communist was as a response to the previous tyrannical governments?
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The point is that the name is a generic term in the English language.
I dunno. Say I search for "dell buy", because Dell is the only major OEM I know of and I have friends that use Dell. Surely it would be legitimate for Micron to allow an ad to come up that says "We sell computers at lower-than-Dell prices!"
why? If Micron are so good, why can't they get the same brand awareness as Dell?
More to the point, I think that trademark law shouldn't cover this. The point of a trademark is to ensure that there is no consumer confusion between two brands.
Maybe it should be about that, but it's also to stop people from taking unfair advantage of another company's expense. Whether or not it is unfair is a matter of opinion. As far as I can tell, current legal opinion is that this is unfair, although clearly some people disagree.
Nope. I tried it on google.co.uk, from England, and got no ads.
Nope. MS have a trademark, and have to defend it, because people do use it as a generic term for a GUI. Now their concerned that the multi-million dollar advertising campaign may be hijacked by some competitor with an axe to grind. And they believe they have a string case even though the word is spelt with a different letter, and the term "Windows" is so generic, that people often refer to any WIMP GUI as windows or variants therof. Many people regularly refer to The X windowing system as X-windows.
Playboy is in a similar situation. They have seen their competiitors take advantage of the money they spent on brand awareness to compete directly. They are obliged to defend their trademark.
Go ahead and try to sell Kleenex tissues and see how quickly you are slapped down.
This is because it's so common that they have to be seen to act to keep hold of their trademark. It helps that it's a whimsical name. If they'd called them "tissue" tissues, they would have had no trademrak at all.
1. For starters, you can't trademark a word in extremely common usage. Look what trouble MS had to go through to get the 'Windows' trademark.
Tell that to Ford - a motor company that's named after a shallow river crossing. Or one of their major rivals, General Motors, which has a purely descriptive name. Come to think of it, most brand names are in common usage. Try calling a movie studio Universal.
A company should not be allowed to appropriate a name in an industry where the name is synonymous or nearly so with the purpose of the product being sold. The common term 'playboy' has always (at least well before the magazine started publishing) been synonymous with women and sex.
Well, dictionary.com says it's a man devoted to the pursuoit of pleasure. The magazine "Playboy", has managed to redefine it so that it's more specifically about sex. The comapny is pretty much responsible for "the creation of the association."
I'm not saying this is the law - I'm saying this is how the law should be (IMO) interepreted based on the logic of trademarks. The original judge did get it right, though perhaps s/he didn't make enough of a distinction.
Why? Playboy has spent a lot of money from the beginning, in becoming a major porn mag. It has made the name its own. If people are searching for Playboy, they most likely mean Playboy magazine, and they are most likely not searching for a hedonist. They are after porn, and since Playboy has spent their money and efforts in making their name succesful, why should some other company be able to take advatntage of this brand recongition to peddle a competitor? Why can't they produce the same level of brand awareness?
And when did "leverage" become a verb?
Think of P2P as a glorified client version of the web with a decent index - its just giant shareware site, or a shared file server.
It has a disproportionatee quantity of data that cannot be legally downloaded. Most FTP servers would probably be shut down if they were distributing large amounts of copyrighted data without permission.
I love those early episodes. Something that was good from a story point of view, that they didn't do so much later on, was to separate the Doctor from the companions. It made the companions seem to be in much greater danger than if they had The Doctor easily able to save them.
Simple paraphrasing of existing code is not allowed by the GPL.
But is it a copyright violation? After all, the GPL does not have the power to prevent anything that is not disallowed by copyright.
This is pretty similar to the reverse engineering of BIOS. The reverse engineers produced a spec based on the code, and then another team wrote code based on the spec. Could they have done something similar? They may end up with remarkable similar code, and also implementation of functions that are never called. It depends on what the code does, and how it works.
Shhh... Don't say nasty things about open source software. Please repeat this Mantra, "Linux is the perfect OS. Open source software never has any bugs". Or just go for the old "Open source, closed minds. We are Slashdot"
Now, "CP/M" -- that sounded super technical.
Ahhh, Thanks! I just couldn't remember that ones name.
True. It wa annoying. That was fixed by version 11.0.
Because they're already familar with Watcom?
.libs and dlls?
Because they like an IDE?
Because Watcom has better support for Windows
I think the main reason though, is "Why not?". Why use GCC instead of Watcom? There's no overriding reason not to use Watcom. A lot of people have been using it for a while. Why switch?
Lots of people seem to agree with you, but for some reason, I've never worked out what it is that it doesn't do. Personally, I'm quite fond of it. The main reason for this is I'm a screen space miser, and It's one of the few IDEs that comes with a full screen editor.
Watcom is an IDE. It contains a compiler, but it also contains everything else you might want.
The topic is software that prevents forgery of money. This guys talking about copying software. So it is off-topic
That's the power of marketing. They just need a powerful technical sounding name.
Tedhnology simply has to appear to move with the times. Having out of date looking names makes the software appear out of date. This is not what marketing people want, so they follow the conventions. The naming schemes change, but the policy is consistent.
We started off with strings off abbreviations. MS-DOS, VAX, VIC-20. This was probably due to the dominance of IBM, PS/2. Computers were powerful technical devices at the time. They needed a technical sounding name.
When VisiCalc became popular. We had a whole new era of naming conventions (There was an overlap. It takes a couple of years for the convention to become popular). Hence we have products with names that are simply 2 words strung together. Like WordPerfect. In the mid 80's, and early 90's we had computers that were meant to be friendly, so fairly simple relevent names were in vogue, gradually becoming more whimsical., e.g, you know Word is a word processor, can guess lightwave is a ray tracing package, but it would be hard to guess that Opera is a web browser if you didn't already know. Now computers are "cool" accesories, so products have to have suitably cool names. A quick and easy way to do this is to string an initial and a semi-related noun together. Everyone does this. For marketing people, it must be the thing to do.
The publishers do want twice the royalties, but really, what they want is to renegotiate the deals tyhat they agreed to a while ago.
This isn't to say that their argument has no merits. Personally, I think it shouldn't have merit. I'm sure copyright used to be about preoviding an incentive for people to create and publish, so that creative works could be enjoyed by all. Now it seems that the purpose is to prevent people from copying. When did copying become an inherently bad thing to want to do? I fully agree that a creator is entitled to a certain proportion of the profits of his work, and I accept that there are good reasons to want to limit redistribution, but copying, and the ability to copy is a good thing. It's the very basis of the entire media industry.
The record industry seems to be busily generating unscientific reports telling us that file sharing is damaging sales, and seem to be the only ones falling for it. They are busily trying to stop people from copying their stuff, rather than focussing on increasing sales. They seem to believe that if they stop people from copying, their losses will go down, even if the downloaders don't start buying.
The world, especially the RIAA needs to realise the only way to increase their sales is to sell people what they want. People are willing to buy mp3s. It doesn't matter if they share them. If you don't sell them the mp3s, they're going to download them instead, and share those.
Eventually, we may see a standard fro sending listings over the airwaves.
Until that time, there's a viable business model here, as long as anyone can provide the listings using an open standard. The owner of the PVR could then choose a listings provider. The listings provider sets up an ISP, with one of the cheaper "premium" telephone numbers. As long as there are several competing provider companies, the prices should stay low, and the service should be reasonably good.
A lot of Hitchhiker's stuff seem remarkable British. Do you guys actually get half the jokes? I'm pretty sure the Ford Prefect was never an American car, there's no such thing as a Zebra crossing, and you have a completely different type of petty beaurocrat.
Something about the multiplyer effect always smelled like bullshit to me...
Maybe it was the lack of a frictionless economy.
If you ever have a chance, take a course in macroeconomics, take it, really interesting stuff.
Most people here, myself included, are more inclined towards Physics, and can't get out of the equilibrium mindset. It's quite hard for Phycisists to grasp some economics basics like, for example, the idea that there's more debt in the world than money.
Same thing. Communism has turned out to be the most dictatorial form of government.
Well, fashism is pretty dictatorial as well. Why does communism seem to get singled out?
And [various other dictatorships] were, for the most part, less deadly than the communists. At the risk of godwinating this thread, Nazism was responsible for a hell of a lot of deaths, and that only lasted for 12 years, and represented a country with a population of the order of 40 million.
Er.... no. Batista's Cuba was corrupt, but prosperous. Nothing to justify it being turned into a Stalinist hellhole.
Tell that to the poor. Besides, most of the middle east has pretty much the same record on Human rights as Cuba. It's hardly representative of the unique brutality of communist states.
Our fear of Communism was quite justified. Somewhere between 60-80 million people died last century because of collectivist/Communist governments.
This is not the fault of communism. This is the fault of a dictatorial government with total disdain for the people. Many people died in Russia when it was a monarchy. The same goes for pre-revolutionary France, and a large number of faschist dictatorships. None of these were communist. The whole of Europe expanded its empire at the cost of a huge of lives.
People quote these statistics, but never ever make any comparison between these and the pre-communism death rates of the same countries. Could it be that the reason they became communist was as a response to the previous tyrannical governments?