I was contracted to write one a few years ago for installation onto all of a company's notebooks. Once a week it had to be reset, or the machine would purge documents and lock out.
Yeah, I heard about that program. It's called Microsoft Windows.
Step 1: Sign the first cease-and-desist, and haggle with the opposing party over legal fees.
Step [2..n]: Send a nice little letter to the next "n" law firms pointing out that you already have signed a cease-and-desist letter, enclose a photocopy and end the letter by saying "Tough shit. No money in it for you this time".
Yes, that's indeed the way it works. You have to sign the first cease-and-desist (if you are in violation) but the next "n" lawyers won't see a separate cease-and-desist and certainly no money.
Sure-fire way to lose your shirt: Ask for legal advice on Slashdot...
The above is partly correct, mostly not, however:
1. Any interested party (competitors, "fair-competition societies", lawyers acting on their behalf, lawyers on their own) can send out cease-and-desist letters against companies engaging in UNFAIR COMPETITION. This would be: claiming to have a product in stock when you do not; reneging on advertised prices, stuff like that.
2. Only the TRADEMARK OWNER or COPYRIGHT HOLDER (or lawyers acting as their APPOINTED agents) may send out cease-and-desist letters against trademark or copyright infringers.
So, thinking that some lawyer with no connection to the trademark holder sends out a cease-and-desist letter is ridiculous. Yes, technically that would be possible, but then this lawyer would have to answer to the bar association for that.
3. My most important advice, and IANAL: GET A LAWYER! Killustrator is close enough to Adobe Illustrator to possibly be infringing.
4. The money they are demanding is not damages but reimbursement of their legal fees. That's SOP, but nobody says you HAVE to pay it. Heck, I could send you a letter demanding 5 grand. Would you pay?
Least expensive solution: Sign a cease-and-desist letter WRITTEN BY _YOUR_ LAWYER but don't reimburse them for their fictional legal fees. After that, they cannot sue you for DM 400.000 but only for the legal fees. And this is a risk you can take: even if you lose in court, the legal fees for a lost $2000 case are neglegible. A lawyer can simply look up the risk you are taking in BRAGO, the German "price table" for legal fees...
What will they do next? Un-open source StarOffice as well?
Interesting tidbit: Talked to a Linux distributor a couple of days ago that wanted to do a "demo" type Linux CD. They wanted permission from Sun to put a DEMO version of StarOffice onto the CD ROM as well.
Sun said "No". When asked why, they answered something along the line "because we want to make money again with it".
Deja allowed you to nuke your own old posts, though through a somewhat hidden web page. Google should really revive this old service, even if only to avoid copyright problems ("They don't even let me delete my own posts!").
And, Google should not only honour X-No-Archive lines in the header but also in the first line of the body -- people had the clear intention of not having certain posts archived but Google displays them anyway.
And about that IRC archive thing, ain't that a business idea...
They are threading by subject line instead of message ID. This means (a) that if the subject line changes mid-thread, the thread is broken and (b) that if you have a common subject line ("Help: Windows crashes"), all kinds of non-related messages will be grouped together.
Furthermore, by not indenting replies to messages, Google makes it very hard to find out WHO replies to WHICH message.
And the date sorting is only available on the "Advanced" page. Many people never bother going there. If you are using a boolean search on the basic search page (which Google doesn't really allow anyway), there is no point in ranking on relevance; therefore it should be sorted by date.
While Google might be a great web search engine, I don't think they understand Usenet in the slightest.
Until they have threading by message ID (ANY threading at all, please) it is kind of pointless to try to follow a discussion.
Until the basic search sorts by date instead of relevance, you'll get a jumble of messages from 1995, 2000, 1998, 1997, conveniently mixed up for your perusal.
Until they find out that a Web search engine cannot be simply "tweaked" to also cover newsgroup messages, their interface will stay inferior to Deja's.
I would have paid for a Deja subscription. Trouble is, Deja.com never asked me to until they went bankrupt.
How long do you think until his registration is approved?
If the U.S. trademark process is similar to the German one (== just as bad), the registration will be examined by a USPTO officer, and if he doesn't find obvious reasons for declining, the trademark will be accepted and published. Then, there will be an opposition period for a couple of months in which it is rather easy to shoot down a trademark.
After that, the trademark is validly registered, and it becomes tough (== lawsuits) to have the trademark cancelled.
Please note that trademarks might not be registered in the U.S. alone. Other countries will have different procedures.
No, you can't copyright them. You can however register a trademark consisting of three letters. Sun, IBM and AT&T (OK, that's three letters plus punctuation) come to mind.
The shorter the trademarked word is, however, the tougher it will be in court to get a ruling against infringing trademarks that don't describe an EXACTLY COMPETING product.
OpenSSH and SSH, however, are definitely competing products.
-Martin
PS: No offense intended, but is it so hard to keep trademarks, copyright and patents apart?
Trademark law essentially prohibits trademarking nouns
No, it does not. Trademarks will not be registered if they are describing the goods that are named after them and/or if there is a reason to keep the name free for the general public.
Therefore, Apple and Sun have registered their respective company names (nobody mistakes a computer for an apple or the sun), but Microsoft had to pull some strings to get "Windows" registered (well, it uses on-screen windows).
No, trademarks are goods on their own, and they might be sold, leased, licensed, sub-licensed - whatever the trademark owner wants to do with them. This does not dilute the trademark, only non-action on infringements does.
So, giving the OpenSSH people the right to use the trademark under a licensing agreement is a perfectly valid way to solve this. The problem will be however to work out a contract that all parties can agree upon.
Having fought through a cancellation of a registered trademark before, here are a couple of things one should consider:
1. Is there a likelihood of confusion between SSH and OpenSSH? I'd say "yes" because they are similar products and the trademark "SSH" is contained in the name "OpenSSH". So not much of a chance for defending OpenSSH on the grounds of "no likelihood of confusion".
2. Was Tatu the first to use the name "SSH" for a secure shell? If not, then there might be grounds for having his trademark cancelled on grounds of "application in bad faith". This is possibly in Germany, for example, for 10 years after the trademark has been applied for.
3. Having not defended his trademark for four years, Tatu will have trouble getting others to drop the name "SSH" or combinations thereof. HOWEVER, this protects only existing uses of the name "SSH", not other individuals or companies using the name for future products. Also, while he have not have a case against the OpenSSH people, he might thereby have a case against companies like Red Hat or Suse distributing OpenSSH as part of their distributions, and definitely against companies that will be bringing out new Linux distributions in the future. If you have trademark case, you can go after everybody in the food chain. This can get messy.
4. Tatu says he has registrations for "Secure Shell" pending. If someone feels that this name should be free, please contact a lawyer and have him send a nice letter to the respective trademark offices opposing the registration. NOW it is relatively easy to oppose the registration, LATER ON this will be much more difficult.
5. Do any of the OpenSSH developers have sufficient funds to fight this through? This could be getting mighty expensive soon.
This all said, I think the e-mail this guy sent has been very polite and not the typical lawyer-attack letter. Either he's just polite and interested in finding a solution, or he knows he's on shaky grounds.
I put this together just to show you what's possible. If Tatu is in his right to use his trademark, then work out a solution. If there are legitimate reasons for keeping the name "SSH" free, then go ahead and defend against it!
As always, IANAL, but I won a trademark lawsuit before.
Because of the nature of SSL server cannot virtual host SSL so they will never have to worry about blocking multiple sites based on IP.
Sure they have to! At least Verio allows you to use their SSL certificate if you don't want to install your own one. And just because one Verio customer places "indecent" material on their servers, *I* wouldn't want to have *my* SSL pages blocked because they are hosted by Verio and happen to use the Verio certificate. (Mind you, we installed our own one...)
Contrary to popular belief, that was Stalin, not Hitler. Upon hearing "How many legions does the Pope have?", Pius XII answered: "Please inform my son Josef that he will meet my armies in eternity."
Slashdot Mirror
Get an e-mail address like [a-z][a-z][{insert generic family name}]@[hotmail|yahoo|bigfoot|whoever].com and you won't be able to stop the deluge.
I did that once at Hotmail and I had to stop reading the account. Now I am using it only for cases where I have to register with an e-mail address.
-Martin
Yeah, I heard about that program. It's called Microsoft Windows.
-Martin
Step 1: Sign the first cease-and-desist, and haggle with the opposing party over legal fees.
Step [2..n]: Send a nice little letter to the next "n" law firms pointing out that you already have signed a cease-and-desist letter, enclose a photocopy and end the letter by saying "Tough shit. No money in it for you this time".
Yes, that's indeed the way it works. You have to sign the first cease-and-desist (if you are in violation) but the next "n" lawyers won't see a separate cease-and-desist and certainly no money.
-Martin
The above is partly correct, mostly not, however:
1. Any interested party (competitors, "fair-competition societies", lawyers acting on their behalf, lawyers on their own) can send out cease-and-desist letters against companies engaging in UNFAIR COMPETITION. This would be: claiming to have a product in stock when you do not; reneging on advertised prices, stuff like that.
2. Only the TRADEMARK OWNER or COPYRIGHT HOLDER (or lawyers acting as their APPOINTED agents) may send out cease-and-desist letters against trademark or copyright infringers.
So, thinking that some lawyer with no connection to the trademark holder sends out a cease-and-desist letter is ridiculous. Yes, technically that would be possible, but then this lawyer would have to answer to the bar association for that.
3. My most important advice, and IANAL: GET A LAWYER! Killustrator is close enough to Adobe Illustrator to possibly be infringing.
4. The money they are demanding is not damages but reimbursement of their legal fees. That's SOP, but nobody says you HAVE to pay it. Heck, I could send you a letter demanding 5 grand. Would you pay?
Least expensive solution: Sign a cease-and-desist letter WRITTEN BY _YOUR_ LAWYER but don't reimburse them for their fictional legal fees. After that, they cannot sue you for DM 400.000 but only for the legal fees. And this is a risk you can take: even if you lose in court, the legal fees for a lost $2000 case are neglegible. A lawyer can simply look up the risk you are taking in BRAGO, the German "price table" for legal fees ...
-Martin
Interesting tidbit: Talked to a Linux distributor a couple of days ago that wanted to do a "demo" type Linux CD. They wanted permission from Sun to put a DEMO version of StarOffice onto the CD ROM as well.
Sun said "No". When asked why, they answered something along the line "because we want to make money again with it".
Weird.
-Martin
But then again, you _live_ in Texas. That would count as cruel and unusual punishment.
SAP DB database GPLed (no, it's not a goat sex link...)
Didn't generate much interest at that time though.
-Martin
Compare that to the 20 seconds that Deja.com achieved and draw your own conclusions ...
Even if they implement posting, can you imagine participating in discussions only every 36 hours?
-Martin
And, Google should not only honour X-No-Archive lines in the header but also in the first line of the body -- people had the clear intention of not having certain posts archived but Google displays them anyway.
And about that IRC archive thing, ain't that a business idea ...
-Martin
Furthermore, by not indenting replies to messages, Google makes it very hard to find out WHO replies to WHICH message.
And the date sorting is only available on the "Advanced" page. Many people never bother going there. If you are using a boolean search on the basic search page (which Google doesn't really allow anyway), there is no point in ranking on relevance; therefore it should be sorted by date.
-Martin
Until they have threading by message ID (ANY threading at all, please) it is kind of pointless to try to follow a discussion.
Until the basic search sorts by date instead of relevance, you'll get a jumble of messages from 1995, 2000, 1998, 1997, conveniently mixed up for your perusal.
Until they find out that a Web search engine cannot be simply "tweaked" to also cover newsgroup messages, their interface will stay inferior to Deja's.
I would have paid for a Deja subscription. Trouble is, Deja.com never asked me to until they went bankrupt.
-Martin
And I always thought the spelling is "possessive" ...
If the U.S. trademark process is similar to the German one (== just as bad), the registration will be examined by a USPTO officer, and if he doesn't find obvious reasons for declining, the trademark will be accepted and published. Then, there will be an opposition period for a couple of months in which it is rather easy to shoot down a trademark.
After that, the trademark is validly registered, and it becomes tough (== lawsuits) to have the trademark cancelled.
Please note that trademarks might not be registered in the U.S. alone. Other countries will have different procedures.
-Martin
No, you can't copyright them. You can however register a trademark consisting of three letters. Sun, IBM and AT&T (OK, that's three letters plus punctuation) come to mind.
The shorter the trademarked word is, however, the tougher it will be in court to get a ruling against infringing trademarks that don't describe an EXACTLY COMPETING product.
OpenSSH and SSH, however, are definitely competing products.
-Martin
PS: No offense intended, but is it so hard to keep trademarks, copyright and patents apart?
No, it does not. Trademarks will not be registered if they are describing the goods that are named after them and/or if there is a reason to keep the name free for the general public.
Therefore, Apple and Sun have registered their respective company names (nobody mistakes a computer for an apple or the sun), but Microsoft had to pull some strings to get "Windows" registered (well, it uses on-screen windows).
-Martin
So, giving the OpenSSH people the right to use the trademark under a licensing agreement is a perfectly valid way to solve this. The problem will be however to work out a contract that all parties can agree upon.
-Martin
1. Is there a likelihood of confusion between SSH and OpenSSH? I'd say "yes" because they are similar products and the trademark "SSH" is contained in the name "OpenSSH". So not much of a chance for defending OpenSSH on the grounds of "no likelihood of confusion".
2. Was Tatu the first to use the name "SSH" for a secure shell? If not, then there might be grounds for having his trademark cancelled on grounds of "application in bad faith". This is possibly in Germany, for example, for 10 years after the trademark has been applied for.
3. Having not defended his trademark for four years, Tatu will have trouble getting others to drop the name "SSH" or combinations thereof. HOWEVER, this protects only existing uses of the name "SSH", not other individuals or companies using the name for future products. Also, while he have not have a case against the OpenSSH people, he might thereby have a case against companies like Red Hat or Suse distributing OpenSSH as part of their distributions, and definitely against companies that will be bringing out new Linux distributions in the future. If you have trademark case, you can go after everybody in the food chain. This can get messy.
4. Tatu says he has registrations for "Secure Shell" pending. If someone feels that this name should be free, please contact a lawyer and have him send a nice letter to the respective trademark offices opposing the registration. NOW it is relatively easy to oppose the registration, LATER ON this will be much more difficult.
5. Do any of the OpenSSH developers have sufficient funds to fight this through? This could be getting mighty expensive soon.
This all said, I think the e-mail this guy sent has been very polite and not the typical lawyer-attack letter. Either he's just polite and interested in finding a solution, or he knows he's on shaky grounds.
I put this together just to show you what's possible. If Tatu is in his right to use his trademark, then work out a solution. If there are legitimate reasons for keeping the name "SSH" free, then go ahead and defend against it!
As always, IANAL, but I won a trademark lawsuit before.
-Martin
-Martin
Sure they have to! At least Verio allows you to use their SSL certificate if you don't want to install your own one. And just because one Verio customer places "indecent" material on their servers, *I* wouldn't want to have *my* SSL pages blocked because they are hosted by Verio and happen to use the Verio certificate. (Mind you, we installed our own one ...)
-Martin
http://www.uspto.gov/
-Martin
OK, so mark me off-topic ...
-Martin
What domain name will they use to promote it? microsoft.mil?
-Martin
-Martin
They have been in the past, but with their current expansion rate, they are burning a lot of VC money right now.
BTW, what's up with moderation? The score of the posting above is Insightful=1, Troll=1. Weird.
-Martin