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Apple v MS lawsuit to walk again in Lindows.com trial | |
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| Time: 15:55 EST/20:55 GMT | News Source: The Register | Posted By: Bill Roach | ||
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Home of the chutzpah Lindows.com has been handed a spectacular victory by Seattle District Court in its trademark battle with Microsoft. No, it hasn't won, it hasn't achieved an honourable settlement whereby it can keep the name, or just continue business under another name - it's been allowed to introduce Microsoft documents covering the famous Apple-Microsoft copyright case, and the trial has been delayed from April to December because of that. The delay is possibly neither here nor there. On the one hand it means what ought to be a very small matter festers for longer, with all that means in terms of publicity for Lindows.com. On the other, though, a hiatus in the case could well take the matter out of the public eye - but we're sure CEO Michael Robertson will think of something. | ||
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| #1 By 6253 (12.237.219.240) at 3/4/2003 10:37:11 PM |
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Microsoft considered windows a generic term for a product feature, but Microsoft Windows is a trademark for a product.
Microsoft's only problem is going to be how they got sloppy with using Windows (not Microsoft Windows) themselves. I forget which book explains it, but a long time ago, someone at Microsoft came up with the idea of using simple product names like Word. Right away, before they even started, they realized that they had to be anal about putting Microsoft in front of these words. The book says they knew then that Word was not good enough to be a trademark, but Microsoft Word, whenever used in a context which clearly related to word processing software, was clearly a trademark. Context is Microsoft's strongest defense. Windows alone, in the general context of windowed user interfaces, is clearly not a trademark even when capitalized, annotated, footnoted, whatever. But Lindows.com is on very shaky ground because they originally established a context where their product's main feature was emulation of the Microsoft Windows operating system product. That may be one reason why they are backpeddling from those claims (the other reason being that they couldn't pull it off). Suddenly their product isn't comparing itself to Microsoft Windows so much. They should have stopped sooner. If you sell gold watches and call them Roleck's, that's probably a trademark infringement even if your name is Fred Roleck. If you sell umbrellas and call them Roleck's, that's probably not a trademark infringement (unless you do it right next door to Roleck's Umbrellas and yours are not made by them). |
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