I see that Google turns up lts of good hits for this one, so I"ll just touch on the main differences.
- If you rely on a common law trademark, you basically get "squatter's rights" in the geographical areas where you trade. This is, for example, why there can be an unrelated Joe's Diner in every town. These kinds of rights will even prevent someone who later registers a national mark from using it on your turf.
- If you don't register your mark, you'll run into roadblocks trying to file in a federal court, dealing with offshore businesses, and so on.
There was a case where a Canadian company called LANworks (I think they've since been merged into into 3Com) was selling network boot code in the US. Shortly after they appeared, DEC renamed their PCSA product to LANWORKS. Even though DEC registered first, the Canadian Lanworks got to market first and DEC was forced to come up with a new name (Pathworks).
Another thing that seems to be bothering Slashdot readers is the idea that really old trademarks can still be valid. Unlike patents and (supposedly) copyright, trademarks don't expire as long as they remain active and are defended. Louis Chevrolet died a long, long time ago, but Ford still wouldn't be allowed to put his name on their cars today.
Dewey Decimal has never been a generic term, it describes exactly one numbering system. There are no competing publishers producing indexing systems under the same name. This isn't at all like the perpetual Kleenex question where there are multiple products being called the same thing in common usage.
Libraries tend to fade into the background of public consciousness, but just because this isn't a hot consumer product doesn't mean that the trademark is any less valid. If anything, it makes it stronger, because the name is more strongly defined in its niche.
Finally, what really surprises me is how many people weren't aware that Dewey Decimal was a brand name. I know I learned that back when I was a kid, but then again I was always one of those strange creatures who actually read all the trivial fine print crammed into the front and back books and leaflets, and just had to find out what all those obscure disclaimers and printer's marks meant.
It's really been the same publisher all along. The publisher changed hands a few times over the past century and a half, the same as countless other organizations. The 1962 registration isn't when the trademark first came into being, that goes back to the 19th century. Unregistered marks (the ones that get a TM) are still generally valid in common law, registering (the flavor that has a circled R) just helps to give them teeth. In that respect it's a bit like how US copyright works.
There isn't really any need for speculation, since the evidence is right in the hotel's advertising, including advertising they are presenting on the Internet at this moment. They can number things any way the like, but they don't have permission to use the name in trade. Forst Press in its various incarnations has held the "Dewey Decimal Classification" mark since 1876, and even went to the trouble of registering in 1962.
Open Group and Microsoft do have various cross licensing agreements, so somehow I'm sure they obtained the necessary permission (see the suit with Apple; Open Group aren't shy about this stuff). MS do seem to be going out of their way on this one too, given the product's clumsy name.
One more time: The hotel isn't just using the classification system, it stole the trademark "Dewey Decimal" to advertise a profit-making business that uses the system.
If Microsoft decided to rename its Services for Unix product to Linux.NET without getting Mr. Torvald's permission, would that be okay?
and i wasn't aware that our library paid a license fee. (In fact, i don't remember that in our expenses at all, which makes me wonder whether it fell under 'miscellaneous,' or whether our relatively-new library simply failed to bother...)
It's sort of a hidden fee. The DDC book costs about $400, new edition every 3 years or so.
Note though, that the hotel isn't being sued for using the classification system, but for infringing on the Dewey trademark for commercial purposes.
it sure seems that if some guy published something anonymously in 1876, he probably intended it to be in the public domain.
Nope. Then, as now, there were provisions to leave one's name off a published work and still retain copyright. This is what Dewey did. He published it through a company he controlled.
elementary schools that teach the system? Or is that included in their library's license?
Yep. Training materials have long been a part of it.
And how come we're teaching a proprietary, trademarked system?
Nearly everything you'll find in a library is proprietary, copyrighted material. The system is taught because it's what many libraries use, and people need to know how to find stuff in them.
Alternatives are now available, such as the Library of Congress system, and a number of newer libraries, notably in academentia, do use it. The cost of replacing the catalog for an existing collection has to be weighed against the price of Dewey manuals, though.
What did you want to do from the shell? Some programs are designed to be used from a command line in the Unix way, others are happier being controlled via the GUI and OSA [which you can still get to from the shell using open(1) and osascript(1)].
Those commands won't completely eliminate Applescript, but they will let you stick mostly to sh and only bring in OSA where the target program demands it.
Do the Wall Street types know something that we don't about the likelihood of SCO actually winning in court, or are they just massively ignorant about how much SCO is going to go down once this issue gets heard in a court of law?
Most are surely speculating or shorting, betting they can get out before the price goes the wrong way. If you bought at 5 and sold at 15, you'd probably be pretty happy about the FUD right now.
A hydrogen powered car needs H2, where will the hydrogen come from?
You can get the fuel (perhaps as methanol) from just about any organic source, including sewage and garbage. Natural gas is the convenient way to get hydrogen and methanol right now, but it's certainly not the only source.
It seems to work maybe 1 in 5 times. They pretty clearly did some serious underestimation of the server resources they's need to pull off this kind of thing, so now they are effectively DOS'ing Web clients by holding them up while their server chikes.
Eolas: "Internet Explorer uses plug-ins?! WTF?! When did M$ start doing that? I invented those things, dammit! I'mma sue 'em"
In fairness, Eolas started making noises about this stuff early in 1995, and did notify the browser vendors that applets would be covered by their patent application. All said they'd wait and see if the patent was approved before doing anything. So the patent was approved, no one had done anything, and after a bunch of hearings and appeals, here we are.
So, the Eolas thing was hardly a surprise. The big surprise is that so little apparent effort went into coming up with decent alternatives until the last minute.
The p2p progams typically dump the downloads into the user's shared directory, so tracking the spread of available download locations would be one way to get the data.
someone should purchase an itunes file from someone who has already purchased it legally. then they can legally break the drm apple has in place in order to use the product for which they paid.
That would still be opening a can of worms for the seller, who has agreed not to allow that kind of thng when buying the track from Apple:
You agree that you will not attempt to, or encourage or assist any other person to, circumvent or modify any security technology or software that is part of the Service or used to administer the Usage Rules.
A sale like that would be "encouraging" someone else to break the DRM, y'know?
i wonder if this is "handled" by the contract you agree to.
The agreement doesn't specifically get into personal resale, but it does stress repeatedly that the product is for "personal, noncommercial use." That language is vague enough to leave the question open:/
With screwdrivers, same as in town. Really though, you don't want to do much more than pop off the bottom cover without some proper documentation on hand. There's some fragile wiring and thermal interfaces inside that you want to know about beforehand, if having a working computer after reassembly is part of the plan.
Novell kind of distanced themselves from that claim after SCO pulled out a side agreement that did seem to show the copyrights were transferred. The judge who was looking at the USL/BSD dispute did, at the time, cast a lot of doubt on the validity of those copyrights, so ultimately it may not even matter who holds the registrations.
Copyright laws aren't entirely uniform among different countries, and they were much more varied at the time most of the Unix code was written, so it would be unwise to hang too much weight on the BSD settlement.
GROKLAW articles probably won't make too much sense unless you follow the site over time. Its whole purpose is to dissect the details, to sift the reality from the PR. In this case, it all goes back to the complaint SCO filed against IBM. Much of SCO's argument hinges on the assumption that the reader will buy the idea that "UNIX" as a generic term is the same thing as "UNIX" the SCO-owned code base, hence the analysis that attempts to squash that notion from any conceivable angle.
Distribution can be controlled using HTTP auth and perhaps SSL.
The aggregators aren't really that complicated, and the interfaces are improving over time. Wtht the one I use, all it takes is to drag one of those little orange icons to the dock, I maybe type in a name for the feed, and its done.
In chatting with some friends (ordinary people, plain old working stiffs) around the time Columbia went missing, most of them were shocked when I mentioned that nobody's even set foot on the moon in 30 years, or that there was supposed to be a bunch of in-orbit infrastructure a lot more ambitious than the new Mir clone that was never built, or that the current equipment wouldn't get people out of orbit if we wanted it to.
Slashdot Mirror
I think no one ever had the idea of inventing (and making a trademark out of it) an alternative alphabet.
Sure you have! Unicode is just such a beast.
Hey, we're reading /. we're the people who have been called strange :-)
I thought that was the kid from Beetlejuice.
I see that Google turns up lts of good hits for this one, so I"ll just touch on the main differences.
- If you rely on a common law trademark, you basically get "squatter's rights" in the geographical areas where you trade. This is, for example, why there can be an unrelated Joe's Diner in every town. These kinds of rights will even prevent someone who later registers a national mark from using it on your turf.
- If you don't register your mark, you'll run into roadblocks trying to file in a federal court, dealing with offshore businesses, and so on.
There was a case where a Canadian company called LANworks (I think they've since been merged into into 3Com) was selling network boot code in the US. Shortly after they appeared, DEC renamed their PCSA product to LANWORKS. Even though DEC registered first, the Canadian Lanworks got to market first and DEC was forced to come up with a new name (Pathworks).
Another thing that seems to be bothering Slashdot readers is the idea that really old trademarks can still be valid. Unlike patents and (supposedly) copyright, trademarks don't expire as long as they remain active and are defended. Louis Chevrolet died a long, long time ago, but Ford still wouldn't be allowed to put his name on their cars today.
Dewey Decimal has never been a generic term, it describes exactly one numbering system. There are no competing publishers producing indexing systems under the same name. This isn't at all like the perpetual Kleenex question where there are multiple products being called the same thing in common usage.
Libraries tend to fade into the background of public consciousness, but just because this isn't a hot consumer product doesn't mean that the trademark is any less valid. If anything, it makes it stronger, because the name is more strongly defined in its niche.
Finally, what really surprises me is how many people weren't aware that Dewey Decimal was a brand name. I know I learned that back when I was a kid, but then again I was always one of those strange creatures who actually read all the trivial fine print crammed into the front and back books and leaflets, and just had to find out what all those obscure disclaimers and printer's marks meant.
It's really been the same publisher all along. The publisher changed hands a few times over the past century and a half, the same as countless other organizations. The 1962 registration isn't when the trademark first came into being, that goes back to the 19th century. Unregistered marks (the ones that get a TM) are still generally valid in common law, registering (the flavor that has a circled R) just helps to give them teeth. In that respect it's a bit like how US copyright works.
There isn't really any need for speculation, since the evidence is right in the hotel's advertising, including advertising they are presenting on the Internet at this moment. They can number things any way the like, but they don't have permission to use the name in trade. Forst Press in its various incarnations has held the "Dewey Decimal Classification" mark since 1876, and even went to the trouble of registering in 1962.
Open Group and Microsoft do have various cross licensing agreements, so somehow I'm sure they obtained the necessary permission (see the suit with Apple; Open Group aren't shy about this stuff). MS do seem to be going out of their way on this one too, given the product's clumsy name.
One more time: The hotel isn't just using the classification system, it stole the trademark "Dewey Decimal" to advertise a profit-making business that uses the system. If Microsoft decided to rename its Services for Unix product to Linux.NET without getting Mr. Torvald's permission, would that be okay?
It's sort of a hidden fee. The DDC book costs about $400, new edition every 3 years or so.
Note though, that the hotel isn't being sued for using the classification system, but for infringing on the Dewey trademark for commercial purposes.
it sure seems that if some guy published something anonymously in 1876, he probably intended it to be in the public domain.
Nope. Then, as now, there were provisions to leave one's name off a published work and still retain copyright. This is what Dewey did. He published it through a company he controlled.
elementary schools that teach the system? Or is that included in their library's license?
Yep. Training materials have long been a part of it.
And how come we're teaching a proprietary, trademarked system?
Nearly everything you'll find in a library is proprietary, copyrighted material. The system is taught because it's what many libraries use, and people need to know how to find stuff in them.
Alternatives are now available, such as the Library of Congress system, and a number of newer libraries, notably in academentia, do use it. The cost of replacing the catalog for an existing collection has to be weighed against the price of Dewey manuals, though.
Where are the shell scripts?
What did you want to do from the shell? Some programs are designed to be used from a command line in the Unix way, others are happier being controlled via the GUI and OSA [which you can still get to from the shell using open(1) and osascript(1)]. Those commands won't completely eliminate Applescript, but they will let you stick mostly to sh and only bring in OSA where the target program demands it.
Do the Wall Street types know something that we don't about the likelihood of SCO actually winning in court, or are they just massively ignorant about how much SCO is going to go down once this issue gets heard in a court of law?
Most are surely speculating or shorting, betting they can get out before the price goes the wrong way. If you bought at 5 and sold at 15, you'd probably be pretty happy about the FUD right now.
A hydrogen powered car needs H2, where will the hydrogen come from?
You can get the fuel (perhaps as methanol) from just about any organic source, including sewage and garbage. Natural gas is the convenient way to get hydrogen and methanol right now, but it's certainly not the only source.
This one might be a bit easier to get used to than some of the freakier chorded setups.
It seems to work maybe 1 in 5 times. They pretty clearly did some serious underestimation of the server resources they's need to pull off this kind of thing, so now they are effectively DOS'ing Web clients by holding them up while their server chikes.
Yep, it was indeed an early attempt to produce a practical silicone rubber (obviously, Dow Corning learned a few things since).
There are instructions for ordering DC 3179 dilatant compound in large amounts (100 lbs or more) on these pages.
Eolas: "Internet Explorer uses plug-ins?! WTF?! When did M$ start doing that? I invented those things, dammit! I'mma sue 'em" In fairness, Eolas started making noises about this stuff early in 1995, and did notify the browser vendors that applets would be covered by their patent application. All said they'd wait and see if the patent was approved before doing anything. So the patent was approved, no one had done anything, and after a bunch of hearings and appeals, here we are. So, the Eolas thing was hardly a surprise. The big surprise is that so little apparent effort went into coming up with decent alternatives until the last minute.
The p2p progams typically dump the downloads into the user's shared directory, so tracking the spread of available download locations would be one way to get the data.
That would still be opening a can of worms for the seller, who has agreed not to allow that kind of thng when buying the track from Apple:
A sale like that would be "encouraging" someone else to break the DRM, y'know?
has anyone read it?
Yep.
i wonder if this is "handled" by the contract you agree to.
The agreement doesn't specifically get into personal resale, but it does stress repeatedly that the product is for "personal, noncommercial use." That language is vague enough to leave the question open :/
With screwdrivers, same as in town. Really though, you don't want to do much more than pop off the bottom cover without some proper documentation on hand. There's some fragile wiring and thermal interfaces inside that you want to know about beforehand, if having a working computer after reassembly is part of the plan.
Novell kind of distanced themselves from that claim after SCO pulled out a side agreement that did seem to show the copyrights were transferred. The judge who was looking at the USL/BSD dispute did, at the time, cast a lot of doubt on the validity of those copyrights, so ultimately it may not even matter who holds the registrations. Copyright laws aren't entirely uniform among different countries, and they were much more varied at the time most of the Unix code was written, so it would be unwise to hang too much weight on the BSD settlement.
Really, even BSA don't want to touch it. Check out this.
SCO doesn't belong to BSA, so they won't get involved. On the other hand, IBM does belong to BSA....
GROKLAW articles probably won't make too much sense unless you follow the site over time. Its whole purpose is to dissect the details, to sift the reality from the PR. In this case, it all goes back to the complaint SCO filed against IBM. Much of SCO's argument hinges on the assumption that the reader will buy the idea that "UNIX" as a generic term is the same thing as "UNIX" the SCO-owned code base, hence the analysis that attempts to squash that notion from any conceivable angle.
Distribution can be controlled using HTTP auth and perhaps SSL. The aggregators aren't really that complicated, and the interfaces are improving over time. Wtht the one I use, all it takes is to drag one of those little orange icons to the dock, I maybe type in a name for the feed, and its done.
In chatting with some friends (ordinary people, plain old working stiffs) around the time Columbia went missing, most of them were shocked when I mentioned that nobody's even set foot on the moon in 30 years, or that there was supposed to be a bunch of in-orbit infrastructure a lot more ambitious than the new Mir clone that was never built, or that the current equipment wouldn't get people out of orbit if we wanted it to.