Re: Political economy of distributed search (was topical

Steve Jones (stevej@halcyon.com)
Fri, 3 May 1996 11:45:31 -0700

Saw this note and just wanted to comment that we've had some experience with
trademark/patent attorneys, and have worked on several registrations of our
own. The only important issue with respect to trademark infringement according
to the attorneys and examining attorneys we've dealt with is whether "the use or
misuse of a mark would cause confusion in the mind of the consumer." If the mark
(whether used/misused by a computer program or human) causes confusion in
the mind
of a consumer of goods or services in that class (i.e., International Class
9, "computers
and electronics"), then there's an infringement. If it causes a computer
program to
become confused, then there's no infringement because the computer program
is not
a consumer. I'm not a lawyer though, and if you're staking your business on
this,
see a good trademark attorney.

Steve Jones
General Software, Inc.

At 09:39 AM 5/3/96 +0000, you wrote:
>On the first Point I agree with Benjamin. US copyright law doesn't prevent
>a magazine subscriber from paying someone to clip all the ads out of their
>magazines before reading. I'm not sure it would prevent a firm from doing
>this to the magazines themselves. They just can't print the articles again
>without the ads (or with them for that matter).
>
>On the second, I'm not sure there is even a violation of trademark. The nut
>of trademark law is (1) do you capitalize on the brand name in sales or (2)
>damage the brand through your use. Thus I can say my software is "Netscape
>Navigator compatable" if I note the trademark of Netscape. I can't use
>their logo and I might have problems marketing Tetscape Navigator because of
>similarities (confusion to the buyer) and weakening their brand (causing
>damage to their intangible property). If my software needs to ID itself as
>Mozilla to accomplish compatability then I may do that without fear, because
>I'm not using Mozilla for my marketing or to establish any sort of brand
>identity.