Believe it or not Coca-Cola actually has trademarks on several items including mousepads, kitchen timers, salt&pepper shakers, notepads, and a lot more. I didn't see software in the few I looked through but if their lawyers missed it then you are good to go. Check out Tess and search for Coca Cola.
Just because $20 is affordable doesn't mean that is what it should cost. I mean I could afford $20 for a pack of gum but that doesn't make it right. When you consider the millions of dollars that the studios get from in-theatre showings, Pay movie channels (HBO, Showtime, etc.) and international distribution rights it seems to me that they could cut Joe Homebody a break. If DVD's cost closer to what they physically cost to produce I would probably have a much larger collection. The internet makes it even easier because they could take away most of the middlemen. Charge me $5 for a movie I can download and keep without restriction and I would buy a lot more movies than I would ever buy and I am sure I am not unique.
I understand that it is hard to predict flops but there are some that they have to know will go straight to video.
As for the cost of movies, $9-10 is outrageous. That kind of money to sit in a noisy theatre with sticky floors and long lines is crazy. I can afford it but I choose not to. There are very few movies that are worth seeing in the theatre anymore. Finally, I can get Coke for about 25 cents per can from Sam's Club.
I've said it a hundred times in this article alone but obviously some people don't know how to read. So instead I will continue your example out of the Microsoft bashing realm that you are stuck. Apple is a generic word. So is Sun. Java is not just a word but a place in Indonesia.
You did a very good job of presenting their point. Here are a couple of my rebuttals:
1) Yes talented artists demand a lot of money but that is because somebody will pay it (much like Baseball players - see A.Rod). If you stop paying them maybe they will retire and then there will be another 500,000 people more than eager to take their place. A lot of these guys have become old hat anyway (like Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Mel Gibson, etc.). Time to let some new blood into Hollywood. There is a big difference between making a living as an actor and being a filthy rich bastard actor.
2)Bombs in the theatre will be bombs in the video store also. Maybe if Hollywood focused on putting out a few good movies each year instead of bombarding us with constant crap then there would be less bombs. I can't believe that Movie executives can't see the bombs coming. I'm not even in that industry and I can't take one look at a movie and go "bomb."
3)Finally, If DVD's were more affordable then more people would buy them regardless of free bootlegs available. When presented with the choice of a $5 real movie or a free movie from a questionable source, I personally would choose $5. That is of course assuming that I want to own the movie anyway. If I don't want to own it then you never would get my money anyway. I would probably borrow it from a friend or the library and watch it once.
I apologize for the long-windedness of this post but I hope my points make sense.
Crayon, much like any other word can be trademarked for a specific use (like Apple). Check out Tess (see link below) and do a search for Crayon. While you're there, read about trademark laws.
You're kidding right? It's the f'ed up laws of Germany that got SuSE into this mess in the first place. In the US you can't just sue somebody without the company knowing. You also wouldn't win shit unless somebody has a trademark on Crayon computer software.
Unless Crayola has a trademark in Germany then they are pretty much out of luck. Also, see my link above for Tess and see if Crayola even has a trademark on Crayons. Seems to me that Crayons came before Crayola but I am too tired to do the research myself (is there a mod for lazy?).
While laws are pretty screwed up here in the US, they seem even worse in Germany. If you want to see all the Crayon trademarks in the US then just use TESS. That's the US Trademark Electronic Search System. You can see that you can use Crayon as long as you don't use it for a product similar to the ones listed there.
Again you are talking about buying something for all 2000 employees and training them on the software that comes with it. When you are dealing with end users, who only know word and excel there is no alternative to floppy. Plus anything you install is just another worry as somebody else pointed out.
OK. So I am going to go out and get CD burners for all 2000 employees, train them on Nero, Easy CD, whatever and waste a disk each night (assuming I am not using rewritable). We have stacks and stacks of floppies sitting around. It takes two seconds to throw something on floppy and most Word and Excel files are under 1MB.
As for boot cds. While most PC's can do it, it usually requires changing the boot order in your BIOS unless it doesn't find your hard drive at all.
When somebody left the company last year their replacement presented me with a stack of 5.25" disks expecting me to do something with them. I promptly went across the street to Bryant Park and played frisbee.
The problem is that you are not supposed to work directly from the floppy. That is just asking for trouble. You use the floppy to transfer and store the document.
Bite your tongue. Floppies are still one of the fastest, cheapest, most convienient ways to transfer files between two non-networked computers. I know a lot of people who bring work home with them on a floppy. A lot easier than emailing it to themselves no to mention more secure. It's also nice to have that boot floppy when your hard drive fails.
If you live in a wealthy enough neighborhood you could probably get everybody together and build your own mini-ISP. Somebody here I am sure has the link to how to do it. Something about ordering twisted pair from the phone company from a place that has high-speed to your house and then doling it out to you neighbors either wired or wireless.
You're telling me that you can trademark a term without having any related product? That seems very strange.
There are free tools for some countries but you're right that there isn't a tool that does all countries. You really should worry most about the country you are hosted in. There is not much that another country can do if you have no operations in their country. Suse happens to have offices in Germany.
You can't just trademark a generic term. You can trademark a term that is associated with a particular product or service (which would actually be a service mark). For example, I can't just trademark Figleaf but I could trademark Figleaf tissues.
Secondly, there is a way to research trademarks to find out whether you would be violation one or not. Most people should consult this before naming anything.
I agree and disagree. I agree that free shouldn't matter. If anything, free can be more destructive. I think that intent should be important also, though. It may have no legal basis but I think the intent to deceive should be a factor. Lindows, Aimster, etc. all intentionally use deceptive names to attract attention. There are tons of apps out there with a K in front them to denote they are for KDE including KOffice (Microsoft) and KJukebox (Real). Of course both of those are referred to (and probably trademarked) with their company name.
The one difference with Lindows is that they are use a deceptive name as a marketing tool. They are counting on this lawsuit to give them lots of publicity and rousing the anti-Microsoft crowd to their side.
KIllustrator on the other hand is providing a free, open-source alternative to Illustrator. I'm not positive but I don't think that Adobe has a version of Illustrator for Linux so they are not losing any money.
The thing is that sometimes a name describes what a piece of software does (like Illustrator) and coming up with names that describe what it does but aren't deceptively similar can be difficult. I mean what would you call an illustration program - KDraw (oops that's CorelDraw), KPaint (that's MS Paint). Maybe they should call it "An Application for KDE that uses Vector Graphics to draw pretty pictures"
A) Gracenote was suing Roxio so a settlement would probably be in their favor. You don't typically sue somebody and walk away with less than you started unless you lose and have to pay legal fees.
B) A settlement by its nature is a compromise between the two parties usually out of concern for ever escalating legal fees.
Oh really? You must be one of those guys who formed a dot-com and decided he needed to charge $20/month to recover costs. Then when your company failed to attract anybody you blamed it on a slowing economy.
Have you never seen a subscription service that charges a small amount and decided - what the heck? I do it all the time. I also pay for shareware when I really like it and the price is reasonable.
And let me clarify - I don't think you can make money giving everything away for free. I think that if you charge a reasonably low amount you will attract far more people and when you have no variable cost you will be able to pay all of those inflated CEO salaries.
Do you need me to go into economics here. It's all supply and demand.
If I am in the car industry I can lower my prices and sell more cars. That would further distribute the initial sunk cost but it would still cost me additional time (oh yeah - it costs me labor to make a new car too) and parts (your $2000). I would also run into to the problem that there are only so many cars I can produce at a time to meet the demand. If I produce too many then I have excess inventory sitting around.
In the software industry I can lower my cost almost to nothing and sell more copies of my software. No matter how many copies I sell there is essentially no additional variable cost. In some cases I can even give the software away because I know you will hire my consultants to install it or need my pay-for-support services.
The same economics work for dot-com business in general also. If I have a site I want to charge people for I can either charge $20/month like a lot tried and get maybe a few diehards - or - I can charge $20/year (one time non-recurring) and get lots of people.
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Believe it or not Coca-Cola actually has trademarks on several items including mousepads, kitchen timers, salt&pepper shakers, notepads, and a lot more. I didn't see software in the few I looked through but if their lawyers missed it then you are good to go. Check out Tess and search for Coca Cola.
Just because $20 is affordable doesn't mean that is what it should cost. I mean I could afford $20 for a pack of gum but that doesn't make it right. When you consider the millions of dollars that the studios get from in-theatre showings, Pay movie channels (HBO, Showtime, etc.) and international distribution rights it seems to me that they could cut Joe Homebody a break. If DVD's cost closer to what they physically cost to produce I would probably have a much larger collection. The internet makes it even easier because they could take away most of the middlemen. Charge me $5 for a movie I can download and keep without restriction and I would buy a lot more movies than I would ever buy and I am sure I am not unique. I understand that it is hard to predict flops but there are some that they have to know will go straight to video. As for the cost of movies, $9-10 is outrageous. That kind of money to sit in a noisy theatre with sticky floors and long lines is crazy. I can afford it but I choose not to. There are very few movies that are worth seeing in the theatre anymore. Finally, I can get Coke for about 25 cents per can from Sam's Club.
I've said it a hundred times in this article alone but obviously some people don't know how to read. So instead I will continue your example out of the Microsoft bashing realm that you are stuck. Apple is a generic word. So is Sun. Java is not just a word but a place in Indonesia.
I also apologize for forgetting to switch to Text from HTML. Mod me accordingly. I deserve it.
You did a very good job of presenting their point. Here are a couple of my rebuttals: 1) Yes talented artists demand a lot of money but that is because somebody will pay it (much like Baseball players - see A.Rod). If you stop paying them maybe they will retire and then there will be another 500,000 people more than eager to take their place. A lot of these guys have become old hat anyway (like Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Mel Gibson, etc.). Time to let some new blood into Hollywood. There is a big difference between making a living as an actor and being a filthy rich bastard actor. 2)Bombs in the theatre will be bombs in the video store also. Maybe if Hollywood focused on putting out a few good movies each year instead of bombarding us with constant crap then there would be less bombs. I can't believe that Movie executives can't see the bombs coming. I'm not even in that industry and I can't take one look at a movie and go "bomb." 3)Finally, If DVD's were more affordable then more people would buy them regardless of free bootlegs available. When presented with the choice of a $5 real movie or a free movie from a questionable source, I personally would choose $5. That is of course assuming that I want to own the movie anyway. If I don't want to own it then you never would get my money anyway. I would probably borrow it from a friend or the library and watch it once. I apologize for the long-windedness of this post but I hope my points make sense.
Crayon, much like any other word can be trademarked for a specific use (like Apple). Check out Tess (see link below) and do a search for Crayon. While you're there, read about trademark laws.
You're kidding right? It's the f'ed up laws of Germany that got SuSE into this mess in the first place. In the US you can't just sue somebody without the company knowing. You also wouldn't win shit unless somebody has a trademark on Crayon computer software.
Unless Crayola has a trademark in Germany then they are pretty much out of luck. Also, see my link above for Tess and see if Crayola even has a trademark on Crayons. Seems to me that Crayons came before Crayola but I am too tired to do the research myself (is there a mod for lazy?).
While laws are pretty screwed up here in the US, they seem even worse in Germany. If you want to see all the Crayon trademarks in the US then just use TESS. That's the US Trademark Electronic Search System. You can see that you can use Crayon as long as you don't use it for a product similar to the ones listed there.
Incidentally, this vulnerability probably applies to several other distributions.
I would think this only affects distros that have operations in Germany.
Again you are talking about buying something for all 2000 employees and training them on the software that comes with it. When you are dealing with end users, who only know word and excel there is no alternative to floppy. Plus anything you install is just another worry as somebody else pointed out.
OK. So I am going to go out and get CD burners for all 2000 employees, train them on Nero, Easy CD, whatever and waste a disk each night (assuming I am not using rewritable). We have stacks and stacks of floppies sitting around. It takes two seconds to throw something on floppy and most Word and Excel files are under 1MB. As for boot cds. While most PC's can do it, it usually requires changing the boot order in your BIOS unless it doesn't find your hard drive at all.
When somebody left the company last year their replacement presented me with a stack of 5.25" disks expecting me to do something with them. I promptly went across the street to Bryant Park and played frisbee.
The problem is that you are not supposed to work directly from the floppy. That is just asking for trouble. You use the floppy to transfer and store the document.
Bite your tongue. Floppies are still one of the fastest, cheapest, most convienient ways to transfer files between two non-networked computers. I know a lot of people who bring work home with them on a floppy. A lot easier than emailing it to themselves no to mention more secure. It's also nice to have that boot floppy when your hard drive fails.
This is a link to Cringely talking about rolling your own DSL
If you live in a wealthy enough neighborhood you could probably get everybody together and build your own mini-ISP. Somebody here I am sure has the link to how to do it. Something about ordering twisted pair from the phone company from a place that has high-speed to your house and then doling it out to you neighbors either wired or wireless.
You're telling me that you can trademark a term without having any related product? That seems very strange. There are free tools for some countries but you're right that there isn't a tool that does all countries. You really should worry most about the country you are hosted in. There is not much that another country can do if you have no operations in their country. Suse happens to have offices in Germany.
You can't just trademark a generic term. You can trademark a term that is associated with a particular product or service (which would actually be a service mark). For example, I can't just trademark Figleaf but I could trademark Figleaf tissues.
Secondly, there is a way to research trademarks to find out whether you would be violation one or not. Most people should consult this before naming anything.
I agree and disagree. I agree that free shouldn't matter. If anything, free can be more destructive. I think that intent should be important also, though. It may have no legal basis but I think the intent to deceive should be a factor. Lindows, Aimster, etc. all intentionally use deceptive names to attract attention. There are tons of apps out there with a K in front them to denote they are for KDE including KOffice (Microsoft) and KJukebox (Real). Of course both of those are referred to (and probably trademarked) with their company name.
The one difference with Lindows is that they are use a deceptive name as a marketing tool. They are counting on this lawsuit to give them lots of publicity and rousing the anti-Microsoft crowd to their side. KIllustrator on the other hand is providing a free, open-source alternative to Illustrator. I'm not positive but I don't think that Adobe has a version of Illustrator for Linux so they are not losing any money.
The thing is that sometimes a name describes what a piece of software does (like Illustrator) and coming up with names that describe what it does but aren't deceptively similar can be difficult. I mean what would you call an illustration program - KDraw (oops that's CorelDraw), KPaint (that's MS Paint). Maybe they should call it "An Application for KDE that uses Vector Graphics to draw pretty pictures"
A) Gracenote was suing Roxio so a settlement would probably be in their favor. You don't typically sue somebody and walk away with less than you started unless you lose and have to pay legal fees.
B) A settlement by its nature is a compromise between the two parties usually out of concern for ever escalating legal fees.
Oh really? You must be one of those guys who formed a dot-com and decided he needed to charge $20/month to recover costs. Then when your company failed to attract anybody you blamed it on a slowing economy. Have you never seen a subscription service that charges a small amount and decided - what the heck? I do it all the time. I also pay for shareware when I really like it and the price is reasonable. And let me clarify - I don't think you can make money giving everything away for free. I think that if you charge a reasonably low amount you will attract far more people and when you have no variable cost you will be able to pay all of those inflated CEO salaries.
Do you need me to go into economics here. It's all supply and demand.
If I am in the car industry I can lower my prices and sell more cars. That would further distribute the initial sunk cost but it would still cost me additional time (oh yeah - it costs me labor to make a new car too) and parts (your $2000). I would also run into to the problem that there are only so many cars I can produce at a time to meet the demand. If I produce too many then I have excess inventory sitting around.
In the software industry I can lower my cost almost to nothing and sell more copies of my software. No matter how many copies I sell there is essentially no additional variable cost. In some cases I can even give the software away because I know you will hire my consultants to install it or need my pay-for-support services.
The same economics work for dot-com business in general also. If I have a site I want to charge people for I can either charge $20/month like a lot tried and get maybe a few diehards - or - I can charge $20/year (one time non-recurring) and get lots of people.