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Help the Gnome Foundation Defend the Gnome Trademark Against Groupon

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Re: Help the Gnome Foundation Defend the Gnome Trademark Against Groupon

#221
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without IP GNOME would not care. GNOME users would know not to associate Groupon with GNOME, and without IP you could call all your stuff anything you want, and that does not mean anything to anyone else, unless you manipulate people into seeing the wrong brand in the wrong place. IE, deception.

Your misunderstanding highlights why we need to demolish the term "Intellectual Property". Patents and Copyright stifle innovation and should be reformed or abolished. Trademark is essential consumer protection against fraud and manipulation and is extremely important to keep, although it needs to be fixed not to require prohibitive costs to defend one's trademark.

There was no misunderstanding. Trademarks, as you yourself have said, are also an exploitative tool of abuse by entrenched interests. Impersonation and slander should still be illegal, but the claiming of ownership of a name is only rife for abuse. I'm against IP in general.

Re: Help the Gnome Foundation Defend the Gnome Trademark Against Groupon

#222
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. There are a lot of circumstances in which the case could end in Gnome's favor, without that judgment.

Do you have an example of such a circumstance?

I'm not going to Google it for you. But they could settle the case, e.g. Groupon could agree not to use the name after it becomes clear that Gnome has spent enough to assemble a legal defense. And Gnome decides that the cost of pursuing further action makes it too risky.

Re: Help the Gnome Foundation Defend the Gnome Trademark Against Groupon

#224
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with 2 but not with 1. I think there are loads of people out there who have heard that there is something like Linux, but have never used it. If you never used any *nix you probably don't even know that desktop environments can be switched or changed. Then how would you know about a specific desktop environment? Not accepting to respect a 17 year old trademark is very, very bad though.

You think the team creating a POS terminal at Groupon hadn't heard of GNOME? The very first thing you do when considering customer facing names for products is a web search: first page of hits for me is filled with GNOME desktop.

> The very first thing you should do [...]

Yes, but often people don't do what they are supposed to do. I did the same mistake with an open source project I've written for my thesis. Things like that happen all the time. Especially for people in Windows world there is not much else outside. They probably haven't heard about TextMate or XCode either.

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