Stefano Mazzocchi wrote: > Dirk-Willem van Gulik wrote: > >>On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote: >> >> >>>http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/20020904/sony0203.jpg >> >>Make sure you let your PMC or the board know if you want to take some >>action; for example such as the ASF sending Sony a kind letter that the >>name Cocoon is already in certain use. > > > Ok, maybe "now what?" wasn't exactly explaining my thoughts about this, > so I'll explain my thoughts in more details. > > First of all, "Sony CoCoon" (an acronym for "COnnected COmmunity On > Network") is a TIVO-like networked hard-disk based video recorder. > Google "Sony CoCoon" to know more. > > Now. Cocoon is a common name. Besides, I already stole it from Ron > Howard's movie and, to be honest, there *is* prior art in software for > something called 'Cocoon' which is a javadoc-like tool. > > At some point, I received a "ehm, you stole my software name" from a > nice guy that was, at least, asking for us to differentiate. The result > of that action was that the project was officially named "Apache > Cocoon", the xml doclet code we hosted moved to jakarta-alexandria (and > died, but that's not another issue). We never received any other letter > from the guy and I don't know the status of its project. > > What worries me most, to be entirely honest, is the fact that 'Sony > Cocoon' is linux based. Admittedly a name collision is going to be > extremely rare: who would want to run an 'apache cocoon' inside a 'sony > cocoon' box? But you never know: it has a huge hard disk, it's > networked, it runs linux, it runs a pretty decent MIPS processor and > might be right perfect for a server farm of video streaming with an XML > publishing engine (can you say SMIL?) > > Like many people suggested, doing nothing and sitting there relaxing is > an option and a valid one. I agree. > > However, do you think that Sony would have let us go away with "Apache > PlayStation" if we had one? What if they start selling millions of "sony > cocoon"s? > > So I'm asking the PMC to take a reasonable action to protect our brand > "Apache Cocoon" in a way that would not make it possible for Sony (or > anybody) to make us 'cease and desist' to use our name. >
As I understand it, the use would only be infringing if it was a similar product, which it isn't. Also, incidentally, as I understand it, you can't trademark a word that means something (isn't this why Jurassic Park was a merchandising cockup?). Cheers, Ben. -- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.thebunker.net/ "There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
