Personally, I can see nothing wrong in what Digium is doing to protect its name and market position. It's well overdue in my opinion (try searching on other major brand names and see what happens).
The eventual outcome is going to be that authorized partners of Digium will be allowed to advertise and those that are not will be excluded (a positive outcome in my opinion). The only down side is that there is a short term restriction on adverts whilst some folks get authorized. In Australia, Google now only displays the one advert for the Authorized Australian Distributor of Digium when you search on the terms 'Asterisk' and 'Digium'. So in this market the only authorized Territory Distro is attempting to sell direct to retail customers and cut out their own channel. Imagine if you had that situation in USA/Canada!! Also interesting is that when you search on the term 'Sangoma' in Australia you get fed with an advert for the sale Digium Distributor!!! It seems somewhat hypocritical to rely on trademark protection in one instance but abuse it in another. Cheers Craig Lawrence -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kevin P. Fleming Sent: Friday, 18 January 2008 11:01 AM To: Commercial and Business-Oriented Asterisk Discussion Subject: Re: [asterisk-biz] Digium enforcing its trademarks Brian West wrote: > You shouldn't have to contact Digium for such use cases as "Asterisk > Compatible" or "Works with Asterisk". The issue is *not* the use of the trademarks within the ad copy itself (as you rightly point out), it is the purchase of search results/listings for those trademarks via the AdWords process. As far as I'm aware, it's perfectly acceptable to have an ad that says "Our products are compatible with Asterisk" or "Our products are based on Asterisk" or similar copy, but purchasing 'Asterisk' or 'Digium' as a keyword to get those ads to show up in searches is not allowed unless Digium has authorized you to do so. -- Kevin P. Fleming Director of Software Technologies Digium, Inc. - "The Genuine Asterisk Experience" (TM) _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz
