Re: Red Bull. One could ask for forgiveness rather than permission. But, another approach might be to go directly to Red Bull for permission to use their trademark in return for free advertising for them. I don't know how several RC aircraft makers 'solved' this issue. There are several RC aircraft with the Red Bull livery in addition to several other trademarked liveries. However, one never really knows how lawyers will react on a case by case basis.
Regards, Duane -----Original Message----- From: Reagan Thomas [mailto:thomas...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2011 10:12 AM To: flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Flightgear-devel] .."IP" and litigation risks, was: AH-1 Merge Request On 2/15/2011 8:27 PM, Arnt Karlsen wrote: > On Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:50:36 -0800, Jack wrote in message > <72e5b800-d213-466d-bf46-c3d33d4ae...@gmail.com>: > >> Hi, >> >> The Red Bull livery has been removed from this release. >> >> Download: http://jackmermod.bplaced.net/Files/cobra21511.zip >> >> I find it ridiculous and a bit immature how Oliver people whine about >> a simple logo. >> >> If Oliver really cared about preventing fictitious lawsuits as he >> claims to, he would concentrate his efforts on the several red bull >> logos that are already in our database. > .._where_? > >> If this thread is further interfered with, I will be forced to result >> to more forceful methods of having my work committed, or I may very >> well change the license back to the CC license and our community will >> have missed out on a very high quality aircraft. >> >> Regards, >> Jack > > ..now, imagine where _we_ would have been if tSCOG _had_ a case > against Big Blue. You would have had to pay tSCOG US $1499 (or > whatever it was) for every thread in your cpu. They were targeting > GPL code, and the GPL itself, as anti-American. > > ..even as we celebrate the approaching conclusion of: > http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110215183557939 in > http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20040319041857760 > it is _just_ a side show. http://groklaw.net/ has waaay more. > Jack, You know who takes trademark law seriously? Trademark owners. An owner must protect their trademarks from being used in ways that decrease the value to them. This tends to be two areas, one very specific and the other kind of broad. The first thing they must protect against is their trademark becoming generic; if everyone refers to an adhesive bandage as a "Band-Aid", then Johnson and Johnson, who owns that trademark, runs the risk of losing the exclusive use of it. In fact, they made their advertising jingle many years ago to include "stuck on Band-Aid brand" as a very public way of asserting their ownership of the brand. Did you know Otis Elevator company came up with and trademarked the name "escalator"? They did not actively (enough) assert their ownership of that trademark and have lost any rights of exclusivity to it. It is now a generic term that any company can use to refer to stairs that move or anything else, for that matter. In these cases, it is an *urgent* obligation of the trademark owner to sue the pants off of any infringer. The remaining broad category is your trademark being used in any other way that decreases its value to you. This can be using it to refer to products or things it isn't intended to be associated with, removing the focus from the owner's product(s). Worse are cases where a trademark is used in ways that are harmful to the image of the owner or the owner's products. A hopefully imaginary example here might be the questionable marketing practices of certain people who are selling FlightGear to the public. Hell, even *we* don't want to be associated with them... why would Red Bull (tm) like it any better? They have much more to lose, in terms of gross dollars, than anyone here does if their trademarks were to become associated with misbehavior. So, you might say, let them go after ProSimFraud if they are misbehaving. The ProFraudSimulator people would simply point to FlightGear and say, "hey this is Open Source and *they* did it!" This topic has come up here before and I even checked with American Airlines about use of their logos/trademarks. Their answer was dense legal talk that I roughly translated to mean "we realize we can't stop everybody from using our logos, but boy howdy, we have the right to kick your ass in court if you do it and tick us off!" How is open source Red Hat Enterprise different from open source CentOS? Trademarks. The words "Red Hat" and any logos owned by them are completely removed by the CentOS group, leaving the only encumbrances those obligations covered by the GPL. It's kind of neat that you can take a Red Hat installation, point it to a CentOS repository instead of the Red Hat network and have it install updates. When the updates are complete, Ta dah! You now have a CentOS branded installation. Back on point, Red Hat differentiates its products by the services they provide and the *trademarks* that they own. Sure, you can use their operating system code freely, but not their services or *trademarks*. Like American Airlines, they have the right to kick your ass in court for doing so. If the Red Bull were to get litigious on us, they'd have to put some names on the law suit. There isn't a FlightGear Foundation or any single entity responsible for FG, so right at the top of the list would be names near and dear to us, starting with Curtis Olson. The list of defendants would probably include anyone else identified as being responsible for the infringement, such as whoever committed the livery to git and whoever participated in releasing the software to the public in any other way. Heck, they may even remember to include Jack Mermod. We all break the law every once in a while, so let's do a risk weight comparison between two things that seem pretty minor: Speeding and trademark infringement. I often drive over 60 miles per hour in a 55 MPH zone. My main risk is a fine that will run at most about $80 and my chances of getting caught are relatively low. In comparison, even *successfully* defending yourself from an infringement suit will run at least in the 10's of thousands of dollars. Oh, and given the public nature of the FG project, I'd guess the chance of Red Bull noticing trademark infringement is about 100%. Whether or not they would sue, don't know, but would you risk it? Should Curtis Olson risk it on your behalf? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- The ultimate all-in-one performance toolkit: Intel(R) Parallel Studio XE: Pinpoint memory and threading errors before they happen. Find and fix more than 250 security defects in the development cycle. Locate bottlenecks in serial and parallel code that limit performance. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devfeb _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The ultimate all-in-one performance toolkit: Intel(R) Parallel Studio XE: Pinpoint memory and threading errors before they happen. Find and fix more than 250 security defects in the development cycle. Locate bottlenecks in serial and parallel code that limit performance. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devfeb _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
