On Wed, 4 Feb 2071, Chris Howells wrote:

Hi,

> May I ask why Adobe think that they own Killustrator? 

Because they own a product called "Adobe Illustrator". The owner of a
trademark (in this case "illustrator") has the possibility to prevent
others using this and _similar_ names. 

I should add that I am not a lawyer, but I read a bit about the topic.
In this case I am not sure what Adobe really can do, since
KDE/KIllustrator is not a product you can buy in a store or something like
that. E.g. what happens if the other author (Igor Janssen) buys the
trademark in russia? I think this will be highly complicated and is really
an annoying situation for free software projects in general.

The problem is that even if your product exists a long time before a
commercial variant it will not help you. The first who owns a trademark
has won :-(

More than that you can not even blame Adobe for doing this thing, since
they are forced to do so, otherwise it can happen that they loose their
trademark (the German expression for that is "Markenzeichenverwässerung",
something like dilution of trademark).

So what I am thinking about is:

1. changing the name KIllustrator -> ???
2. Write letters of protest to Adobe. I think this is the only possibility
   to avoid paying a lot of money. If it is possible to bring it to the
   media chances for a fair agreement aren't that bad I guess.
3. Thinking about what to do in general. Since KDE operates all over the
   world at least in theory everyone who owns a trademark could try to
   attack KDE or the authors in that country. There is also the problem
   that a company could buy a trademark now (e.g. kmusic) and use it
   against KDE.

Nevertheless the main problem is that there is IMHO no clear guide how
these cases with non-commercial international projects are handled :-(

ciao, Marco

   

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