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The annoyances of trademark law

I covered the problems Linden Lab is creating by enforcing a more strict Trademark Policy earlier but the topic strikes back from another area:
Last week the new DataPortability Project Logo was revealed after Redhat sent a Cease&Desist to the group as the logo resembled too much of the Fedora logo (Trademark law requires you to fight for your TM, otherwise you lose it).
But now that the new logo is public, the next C&D letter arrived, this time from Vivendi Mobile. Apparently the new logo looks too close to their own trademark of their service ZAOZA which indeed seems to be the case:

So slowly choosing a logo gets annoying as the group actually wanted to concentrate on other things like bringing technical recommendations forward. This is also the reason why again this time the challenge will not be fought but instead the new logo will be tweaked a bit to hopefully look different enough to any other trademarked logo out there on the planet.

TechCrunch has the whole story.

It strikes me though that something with trademark law seems to be wrong.. ;-)

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 11:46 am and is filed under Data Portability, English Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “The annoyances of trademark law”

  1. Dennis Says:
    April 30th, 2008 at 2:34 pm

    Well, this really is annoying, but in this case the similarity is just to obvious…

  2. Christian Scholz Says:
    April 30th, 2008 at 2:45 pm

    no doubt but how can you make sure it never infringes something? I guess it would cost a least a bit of money to do that research (and I wonder if logo contests are the way to go then).

    But anyway, we should concentrate on the actual work and not on the logo. My proposal would be to just use the name as a logo and have no graphics ;-)

  3. Christian Scholz Says:
    April 30th, 2008 at 2:46 pm

    btw, if you look on the website to me it’s not that similar anymore, just in the bw versions.
    Anyway, time to move on.

  4. Matthias Says:
    April 30th, 2008 at 7:11 pm

    Interesting to see that crowdsourcing obivously cannot solve all problems.

  5. Christian Scholz Says:
    April 30th, 2008 at 7:21 pm

    I’d think that if you ask people to do the research and the group is a popular one and to do the job is in some form rewarding people would probably do it. You just need to ask for it I guess ;-)

    But then again I hope nobody said that crowdsourcing solves all problems ;-)

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