trademarks

American Airlines sues Yahoo over trademarked search ads

American Airlines has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Yahoo claiming it is diverting business to the airline's competitors by allowing them to purchase ads that appear next to American Airlines-related search results.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Forth Worth, Texas, late last week, is similar to one that American Airlines filed against Google last year and then settled earlier this year.

The airline contends that allowing other companies to purchase ads that are displayed when someone searches on an American Airlines-trademarked term confuses the public and directs potential American Airlines customers to other companies.

Yahoo spokeswoman … Read more

Open source does not mean 'open to pilfer trademarks,' suggests Google

Some are apparently up in arms that Google is refusing to allow Chrome developers to use its trademarks and the comic book it released to help explain Chrome. To these and others that equate open source with "up for grabs," please pay attention:

Open source is governed by US intellectual property law. It is not above the law.

For those who mistakenly feel that open source is a stick-in-the-eye to "The (IP) Man," you're wrong. Open-source licensing depends upon and indeed presupposes copyright and trademark law. Without copyright there is no copyleft.

Clint Boulton, whose … Read more

iPhone apps of the week

I was on the bus yesterday during my commute home and I decided to check out one of my latest iPhone apps to see if it worked as advertised. There was a loud-talking person yammering away on his cell phone (why must people do this?) and to get away from the racket, I stuck in my ear buds and launched WhiteNoise.

WhiteNoise offers several neutral sounds that are perfect for blocking out annoying sounds and also can be quite relaxing. The interface offers eight buttons of soothing sounds you can start up immediately with a timer if you'd like … Read more

Codeweaver's Chromium a trademark lawsuit waiting to happen? CORRECTION

Correction: Jeremy White of Codeweavers emailed me to let me know that I'm very confused on this.:

Chromium isn't my name; it's Googles, and it's their open source project. They distribute bundles with explicit permission to use both source and binaries in those bundles. (In an irony, in fact, they accidentally messed up and included Chrome trademarks in a bundle that they gave permission to use, so we had to strip those out and replace them with Chromium branding).

Based on a range of posts I saw on the web this morning, which conflated Chromium with Codeweavers that it's not surprising that I was confused. Mea culpa, and sincere apologies to Jeremy and the Codeweaver gang.

Codeweavers, the company behind WINE which enables Windows applications to run on Linux, has done it again. WINE was voted a finalist in Sourceforge's Community Awards earlier this year, earning the dubious distinction of one of the open-source projects "Most Likely to Be Ambiguously and Baselessly Accused of Patent Violation."

This may be true where patents are concerned, but I think Google would have a pretty good trademark claim against Codeweavers right now.

In this case, Codeweavers has made it possible to run the Google Chrome browser on Mac OS X and Linux, and called it "Chromium." As Codeweavers founder and CEO, Jeremy White, notes on his blog, Codeweavers was "looking for a way to show off Wine's new maturity, particularly for porting applications."

Great, right? Yes, except for the name. Chromium has the potential to confuse would-be users as to the source of this cross-platform instantiation of Google Chrome.

United States trademark law is pretty clear on this point:… Read more

Dell refused 'cloud computing' trademark

Dell's attempt to trademark the term "cloud computing" faced another setback last week after the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office sent the company a "non-final" refusal of its application.

The PTO informed Dell on August 12 that its registration of the trademark for the term "cloud computing" was refused because "the applied-for mark merely describes a feature and characteristic of applicant's services...In addition to being merely descriptive, the applied-for mark appears to be generic in connection with the identified services and, therefore, incapable of functioning as a source-identifier for … Read more

Dell unlikely to get trademark for 'cloud computing'

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has reversed course on its earlier move to grant Dell trademark rights to the term "cloud computing." Dell received a preliminary notice on July 8 saying it could have the trademark, but it was withdrawn on Thursday.

Dell spokesman Jeff Blackburn said the company could not speculate on the likelihood of the trademark being eventually approved. "We are waiting just for the decision," he said.

The Patent Office declined to comment on the specifics of Dell's application, but Cynthia Lynch, an administrator for trademark policy and procedure, said … Read more

eBay wins counterfeit-sales suit filed by Tiffany

eBay cannot be forced to police its auction listings to identify counterfeit Tiffany & Co. products, a federal judge ruled on Monday in a lawsuit brought by the iconic 171-year-old jewelry company.

In what could become a landmark case for auction Web sites, the court said trademark law cannot be used to force eBay to shoulder the burden of examining individual auction listings for possible counterfeits.

"The court is not unsympathetic to Tiffany and other rights holders who have invested enormous resources in developing their brands, only to see them illicitly and efficiently exploited by others on the Internet,&… Read more

"Piggybacking" and the open-source trademark issue

Rosetta Stone's trademark lawsuit against a competitor brought to mind the simmering issue of trademark violations in open source. One of the opportunities and challenges in open source is that presumably anyone can be an expert in Project X, Y, or Z. Because of this dispersed expertise, the opportunity to run afoul of trademark violations is rife.

JBoss was constantly wading through this issue, so much so that a website was devoted to it. Bill Burke, then JBoss' chief architect, listed trademarks as one of the most important considerations for any open-source business. Why? Because being the source of code arguably matters more than source code in an open-source business.

Trademarks are all about source. Who is the source of a given product or service?

It's therefore not surprising that Bill Dudney got swatted for offering JBoss training and services. Why? Because he was using JBoss' trademarks and goodwill to sell his own product, and his advertising could have been construed to be advertising services offered by JBoss, the company.

Back to Rosetta Stone. It is complaining about "piggybacking" by a rival, Rocket Languages. What is piggybacking, and how does it relate to open source?… Read more

Search ads trigger trademark lawsuit from rival

In a case that spotlights the growing importance of search engines to commerce, NameSafe has sued a competitor, LifeLock, for trademark infringement involving ads placed next to search results.

NameSafe, which like LifeLock sells services designed to protect customers against identity theft, alleged its rival used NameSafe's name in deceptive search ads on Google, Yahoo, and other search engines.

"The ads created by defendant deceptively contain the words 'NameSafe' and 'NameSafe.com' and those marks are often displayed as hyperlinks. Consumers following the hyperlinks are wrongfully and deceptively directed to the defendant's Web site," the suit … Read more