On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 09:35:10PM +0100, MJ Ray wrote: > On 2003-10-06 20:53:56 +0100 Steve Langasek <vorlon@netexpress.net> > wrote: > > >trademark law doesn't allow us the same latitude for selective > >enforcement that copyright law does > > Can you be more specific, please? I was recently challenged about > this and cannot point at why this would be. Because a generic term cannot be trademarked. You can trademark "Coke" but you can't trademark "Cola." This makes sense because the point of a trademark is too allow for the creation of a brand -- to associate the goodwill that an organization creates with name that they slap on a product. So every time you buy a "Coke" you can rest assured that you're getting something that the Coke folks in Atlanta are willing to vouch for (for whatever that's worth). The answer to your question though lines in the fact that a term can start out as a trademark and, if you don't enforce it, can *become* generic. Linoleum, Zipper and Escalator all used to be trademarks but became generic because the trademarks weren't enforced. AIUI, if anyone can call their OS Debian and if we don't enforce it, Debian will, in the minds of the world, stop refering the OS created by this particular group of people and we will lose rights to the mark. Regards, Mako -- Benjamin Mako Hill mako@debian.org http://mako.yukidoke.org/
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