On Sun, May 08, 2005 at 08:48:55AM -0500, Thomas Cameron wrote: > Red Hat is trademarking Fedora *as it relates to a Linux operating system > distribution.* Red Hat admits that Cornell/UVA have prior use and are not [...] > The Cornell/UVA folks and some people in the community are making more of > this than they need to. Red Hat is not the villain here. They are just > trying to protect the hard work they're doing with the Fedora distribution. > They have no desire to impinge on the Cornell/UVA folks, and it is a pretty > wild stretch of the imagination that this would ever happen. To me and you there isn't. To US trademark law, I don't think it's so clear. Trademarks need to be unique within one of the 45 official international classes of goods and services -- and class 42 is: CLASS 42 (Computer, scientific & legal) Scientific and technological services and research and design relating thereto: industrial analysis and research services; design and development of computer hardware and software; legal services. So, not only are operating systems and digital content management systems not legally distinct, we're not even particularly distinct from any other scientific services, or from legal services -- all the same thing as far as trademark distinctiveness goes. -- Matthew Miller mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx <http://www.mattdm.org/> Boston University Linux ------> <http://linux.bu.edu/> Current office temperature: 73 degrees Fahrenheit.
