Neither is Ford, Cheverolet or R.J. Reynolds. These are all just people's names. General Electric isn't a "custom" name in the tradition of Exxon and Acura either and both words are dictionary words.
Yes. By 'custom name', I meant one that wasn't an English noun.
Historically there has been no problem with this concept. The problem has only arisen recently when rich and litigously agressive companies seek to claim *ownership* of a word due the their holding of a trademark.
Yep. What I argue is that it shouldn't be possible to claim that you have the treadmark of a single common English noun, or a (very) common phrase in English, such as "that's life". I'm informed by my dad, who is a solicitor, that in Britain, that is exactly the case. Dunno about America.
That doesn't stop the lawyers from waving around their trademark registration on the graphic and claiming exclusive rights to the word the graphic contains. Have YOU got the $20,000 and 5 years it would take to fight them? They do. In their case it's their job.
WRT 5 years: You don't need to spend every second of your 5 years fighting a case. That's what your lawyers are for. The case SHOULD be a minor inconvenience, with you telling your lawyers the particulars of it and them handling the legal side.
WRT $20,000: Surely, after winning the case, the prosecuting company should be forced to pay you back your legal fees in full PLUS inconvenience payments. That would discourage this kind of legal challenge.
In your case it's your life ruined. Guess who wins?
If they don't have a legit case, YOU should win.
If anything it's the fault of the damned Judges, part of whose job is to throw out obviously bullshit complaints, or at least deal with them in a fairly summary fashion. Nowadays pretty much every doofey complaint gets the full dog and pony show and just the pretrial fillings alone in such a case are enough to break the average Joe.
I'm not so sure the problem is the judges not throwing out bogus cases. I think the real problem is either REALLY stupid judges actually upholding stupid complaints, or REALLY stupid juries upholding them. If every stupid prosecution case failed, and was made to pay the defense's legal fees PLUS compensation for the inconvenience, this kind of shit wouldn't happen half as much.
I sincerely doubt you'd get away with naming a program that got relatively popular 'Apple' without legal proceedings being brought against you, no.
Trademarking has got ludicrous, especially in the USA, and ANYTHING which is a noun in the dictionary should *not be allowed to be trademarked* IMHO. Fine, allow a custom name to be trademarked, like perhaps Hoover, but not Phoenix or Apple.
Well, their customer service bites the big one, but I'm more than happy with the speed of my 1 meg connection.
Good job you don't live in an area which was served by Cable & Wireless before NTL bought them out, then. They've announced that they won't be upgrading the cable in those areas to receive broadband, since they're already massively in debt. Had enough money to buy out C&W, though. I've just heard a lot of bad stuff about NTL, that's all. I could switch to them in this area, but choose not to. BT with ADSL and Sky work fine for me.
OK, this is the last time i'm gonna post this, honest:-) The UK HAS HAD UNMETERED DIALUP FOR SEVERAL YEARS NOW. Now only that, but we get pseudo-unmetered (limited to 1 hour) local and national calls.
This is good, because it should hopefully mean that companies just won't be able to get away with imposing pathetic 3gig/month limits on broadband services anymore. When the mainstream ARE sending/receiving large media files over the net, they will very quickly become intolerant of these transfer caps. Like I already am.
Interesting, but I can't claim to have the same outlook. I've *always* wanted broadband, from the second I heard about it:-) I loved it when I got it, I still love it. I love the speed, and one of the best things about it is the always-on thing; with even unmetered dialup services not only tie up your phone line, but staying online for long periods of time is discouraged over here in the UK. ISPs don't like it. They can hardly say the same thing about DSL, though, which is designed for the purpose!:-)
I echo your comment about internet call packages but ALSO, BT now have packages whereby you can have unmetered (albeit only up to 1 hour then, stupidly, you must redial) local and national calls, called BT Together. So your comment about per-minute charges for local calls don't really apply either.
Thank you Phroggy, thank you Apple, those ads just made me laugh more than I have in a LONG time:-) Anyone who is prepared to go into one of those ads and make themselves look like a complete moron deserves a medal:-)
That was exactly what I was thinking. I concluded that it is, but that it's very badly written. Join the 'are' and the 'not' together and it seems better: Computers just aren't cute as pets.
JPEG and PNG have different purposes, so PNG will (should) never replace JPEG.
Yes and no. PNG (AFAIK) results in *NO* loss of image quality. Each pixel remains identical to how it was before. It's identical to a bitmap, it just somehow manages to compress the image more. JPEG, however, does result in some loss in image quality. Whilst it might not be easily noticable in photographic pictures, it'd still be nice to have a PERFECT image with a PNG than a slightly lossy one with a JPG. I store all my (non-website) images in PNG format for that very purpose.
I'm just listening. It sounds like any other conservative American radio station that we were listening to when we were on holiday in the US. Cussing underage sex, cussing underage sex, cussing underage sex...
They found that broadband was actually slowing down user interaction with the Net as they are no longer afraid of spending too much time online anymore...
Yet it then says:
... the capacity to be always-on, were something that the average person did not care about.
Surely, the capacity to be always-on == people no longer being afraid of spending too much time online. This blurb is indeed stupid.
You must have been living in a cave for the last few years. We've got this thing called FRIACO (Flat Rate Internet Access Call Origination) now, which allows ISPs to offer a relatively low cost unmetered dialup connection, and many do. Dialup doesn't mean pay-per-minute anymore.
Hang on, let me get this right, you pay $10 for 50 HOURS a month, and you're happy with it??? And I thought BTinternet's 150 hours a month was bad.
You REALLY don't use the internet much. Fair enough, each to their own, but a hell of a lot of people, including me, wouldn't be at ALL satisfied with that. Your 'local' ISP sounds like AOL, but at least AOL give you a free 1000 hour trial every month:-)
I have a $5.95/month 56k unlimited dialup plan, and other than WAITING for huge pictures in my email ("here's ANOTHER 1000KB JPG of my dog d00d!"), and the inability to download ISOs, it's fine.
Yeah, it is. Oh, and the inability to actually download ANYTHING big. Or to have a low gaming latency. Or to stay connected 24/7 with no disconnection. Or to connect almost instantly. Or to have a free phone line....
Hehehe! You people use Euros! Why didn't you stick with your perfectly good currency like us in Britain, instead of buying into the United States of Europe? Now, your markets are going down the toilet (well Germany's anyway) and there's fuck all you can do about it!
Precisely the point I was about to make:-) Having said that, I'm not quite sure why the latency for DSL is lower than that of a dialup modem, because it is. My gaming latency is significantly lower. Is it something to do with the higher bandwidth? If a modem can't quite transfer all the required data sometimes, it will take longer to do so, increasing your ping? I dunno.
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Neither is Ford, Cheverolet or R.J. Reynolds. These are all just people's names.
General Electric isn't a "custom" name in the tradition of Exxon and Acura either and both words are dictionary words.
Yes. By 'custom name', I meant one that wasn't an English noun.
Historically there has been no problem with this concept. The problem has only arisen recently when rich and litigously agressive companies seek to claim *ownership* of a word due the their holding of a trademark.
Yep. What I argue is that it shouldn't be possible to claim that you have the treadmark of a single common English noun, or a (very) common phrase in English, such as "that's life". I'm informed by my dad, who is a solicitor, that in Britain, that is exactly the case. Dunno about America.
That doesn't stop the lawyers from waving around their trademark registration on the graphic and claiming exclusive rights to the word the graphic contains. Have YOU got the $20,000 and 5 years it would take to fight them? They do. In their case it's their job.
WRT 5 years: You don't need to spend every second of your 5 years fighting a case. That's what your lawyers are for. The case SHOULD be a minor inconvenience, with you telling your lawyers the particulars of it and them handling the legal side.
WRT $20,000: Surely, after winning the case, the prosecuting company should be forced to pay you back your legal fees in full PLUS inconvenience payments. That would discourage this kind of legal challenge.
In your case it's your life ruined. Guess who wins?
If they don't have a legit case, YOU should win.
If anything it's the fault of the damned Judges, part of whose job is to throw out obviously bullshit complaints, or at least deal with them in a fairly summary fashion. Nowadays pretty much every doofey complaint gets the full dog and pony show and just the pretrial fillings alone in such a case are enough to break the average Joe.
I'm not so sure the problem is the judges not throwing out bogus cases. I think the real problem is either REALLY stupid judges actually upholding stupid complaints, or REALLY stupid juries upholding them. If every stupid prosecution case failed, and was made to pay the defense's legal fees PLUS compensation for the inconvenience, this kind of shit wouldn't happen half as much.
Homer would say:
Phoenix Technologies threatend to sue Mozilla-based web browser over trademark infringement. Mmmmm, Phoenix.
I sincerely doubt you'd get away with naming a program that got relatively popular 'Apple' without legal proceedings being brought against you, no.
Trademarking has got ludicrous, especially in the USA, and ANYTHING which is a noun in the dictionary should *not be allowed to be trademarked* IMHO. Fine, allow a custom name to be trademarked, like perhaps Hoover, but not Phoenix or Apple.
Oh, just because I say something bad about NTL, you dont have to take me off your damn friends list!!! :-)
Well, their customer service bites the big one, but I'm more than happy with the speed of my 1 meg connection.
Good job you don't live in an area which was served by Cable & Wireless before NTL bought them out, then. They've announced that they won't be upgrading the cable in those areas to receive broadband, since they're already massively in debt. Had enough money to buy out C&W, though. I've just heard a lot of bad stuff about NTL, that's all. I could switch to them in this area, but choose not to. BT with ADSL and Sky work fine for me.
Sigh.
:-) The UK HAS HAD UNMETERED DIALUP FOR SEVERAL YEARS NOW. Now only that, but we get pseudo-unmetered (limited to 1 hour) local and national calls.
OK, this is the last time i'm gonna post this, honest
Thank you for listening.
In most of Europe, broadband is the only flat-rated residential Internet access you can get
Well, that's not the case in the UK, where this study was carried out, so your point is moot.
Ronseal Drying Woodstain. It does exactly what it says on the tin.
This is good, because it should hopefully mean that companies just won't be able to get away with imposing pathetic 3gig/month limits on broadband services anymore. When the mainstream ARE sending/receiving large media files over the net, they will very quickly become intolerant of these transfer caps. Like I already am.
Interesting, but I can't claim to have the same outlook. I've *always* wanted broadband, from the second I heard about it :-) I loved it when I got it, I still love it. I love the speed, and one of the best things about it is the always-on thing; with even unmetered dialup services not only tie up your phone line, but staying online for long periods of time is discouraged over here in the UK. ISPs don't like it. They can hardly say the same thing about DSL, though, which is designed for the purpose! :-)
I echo your comment about internet call packages but ALSO, BT now have packages whereby you can have unmetered (albeit only up to 1 hour then, stupidly, you must redial) local and national calls, called BT Together. So your comment about per-minute charges for local calls don't really apply either.
If we consumed a konstant quantity of online info
:-)
I think you've been spending too much time using Konqueror
Unlimited-time dial-up doesn't exist in the UK
Oh yes it does.
LOL!!!!!
:-) Anyone who is prepared to go into one of those ads and make themselves look like a complete moron deserves a medal :-)
Thank you Phroggy, thank you Apple, those ads just made me laugh more than I have in a LONG time
Sorry mate, but NTL suck too :-) Telewest are OK, but you'd be better off sticking with BT and getting DSL, if and when it's available in your area.
p.s. Is that caption even gramatically correct?
That was exactly what I was thinking. I concluded that it is, but that it's very badly written. Join the 'are' and the 'not' together and it seems better: Computers just aren't cute as pets.
JPEG and PNG have different purposes, so PNG will (should) never replace JPEG.
Yes and no. PNG (AFAIK) results in *NO* loss of image quality. Each pixel remains identical to how it was before. It's identical to a bitmap, it just somehow manages to compress the image more. JPEG, however, does result in some loss in image quality. Whilst it might not be easily noticable in photographic pictures, it'd still be nice to have a PERFECT image with a PNG than a slightly lossy one with a JPG. I store all my (non-website) images in PNG format for that very purpose.
I'm just listening. It sounds like any other conservative American radio station that we were listening to when we were on holiday in the US. Cussing underage sex, cussing underage sex, cussing underage sex...
Not if they release it royalty-free (OK, OK, hypothetical situation).
It also says that:
...
... the capacity to be always-on, were something that the average person did not care about.
They found that broadband was actually slowing down user interaction with the Net as they are no longer afraid of spending too much time online anymore
Yet it then says:
Surely, the capacity to be always-on == people no longer being afraid of spending too much time online. This blurb is indeed stupid.
You must have been living in a cave for the last few years. We've got this thing called FRIACO (Flat Rate Internet Access Call Origination) now, which allows ISPs to offer a relatively low cost unmetered dialup connection, and many do. Dialup doesn't mean pay-per-minute anymore.
Hang on, let me get this right, you pay $10 for 50 HOURS a month, and you're happy with it??? And I thought BTinternet's 150 hours a month was bad.
:-)
You REALLY don't use the internet much. Fair enough, each to their own, but a hell of a lot of people, including me, wouldn't be at ALL satisfied with that. Your 'local' ISP sounds like AOL, but at least AOL give you a free 1000 hour trial every month
I have a $5.95/month 56k unlimited dialup plan, and other than WAITING for huge pictures in my email ("here's ANOTHER 1000KB JPG of my dog d00d!"), and the inability to download ISOs, it's fine.
:-)
Yeah, it is. Oh, and the inability to actually download ANYTHING big. Or to have a low gaming latency. Or to stay connected 24/7 with no disconnection. Or to connect almost instantly. Or to have a free phone line....
Give me my ADSL any day
Hehehe! You people use Euros! Why didn't you stick with your perfectly good currency like us in Britain, instead of buying into the United States of Europe? Now, your markets are going down the toilet (well Germany's anyway) and there's fuck all you can do about it!
Pure digital? What do you think DSL is? Or cable?
:-) Having said that, I'm not quite sure why the latency for DSL is lower than that of a dialup modem, because it is. My gaming latency is significantly lower. Is it something to do with the higher bandwidth? If a modem can't quite transfer all the required data sometimes, it will take longer to do so, increasing your ping? I dunno.
Analog, as well.
Precisely the point I was about to make