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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Legal hints about karbon(14) name
From:       Lenny <kudling () kde ! org>
Date:       2002-06-27 19:09:06
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Hi,

i'd like to inform you that we kindly recieved some legal advice by a dutch 
lawyer, who is specialized in intellectual property protection of technology:

"
1) Apple can cause you trouble in Europe, if they have a Community
trade mark or national trade mark. The only way to find out about this,
is to inquire at the trade mark authorities or let a trade mark
attorney do a search for you. The latter will cost you money, although
this is not terribly expensive (< 500$ I expect).
I suspect that they will only go after you if your program has much
success or has similar functionalities.
2) Assuming that Apple has the proper trade marks, I doubt that it will
be enough to change Karbon in Karbon 14, or even the chemical notation
to avoid legal problems.
3) a) In general you are in a better position if you register your
signs as trade marks.
b) However, a world-wide registration can be pretty expensive. I don't
know about the exact costs. If you would do it for the Benelux alone
(Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg), then it will cost you <= 600
$. You will need a trade mark attorney to perform your registration.
c) You will need to register in all countries where you want to benefit
from trade mark protection for your products. Trade mark right is
territorially bound.
Extra
1) I must furthermore warn you that a trade mark can be striked out, if
it is registered in so-called 'bad faith'. Suppose that you try to
register Karbon in Germany as a trade mark, and Apple can prove that
you do this to trouble them, they can try to annull the trade mark.
2) I don't know whether Apple is inclined to go after you. I suspect
that Apple doesn't want draw this kind of attention from the Linux
community.
"

For the karbon(14) case this is disappointing and encouranging at the same 
time. We as developers don't have the financial resources to register the 
name. Otoh since Apple has strong interest in open source itself, it seems 
rather unlikey, that they'll cause us troubles without any reasons (our 
products are totally different and the names are similar by coincident).

In general i think it would be nice if someone could register (more) 
kde/koffice program names as trademarks.

Bye
Lenny


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