Fundamentally (IANAL) the test is "might it create confusion in a potential customer's mind." You could not open a restaurant called macdonalds even though their trademark is on McDonald's. (Well, you could, but you would hear from Mickey D's lawyers, and they would be grumpy.)
In this case the customer is fairly sophisticated. It's hard to see an Global 5000 IT manager ordering a Z from HP and being shocked when it arrived and was an Intel server, not a mainframe. Unlike your macdonalds restaurant where some poor doofus might wander in and expect to get a Big Mac. OTOH might a negative press article about the HP Z become conflated in some CIO's mind with the IBM z? Perhaps more of an argument there. As McDonald's would argue that if I read a negative Yelp review of your restaurant I might hold it against McDonald's. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Monday, September 21, 2015 3:16 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Accept nothing less than Z On 2015-09-21 15:49, Charles Mills wrote: > I saw that and almost posted it here. > > IBM has a registered trademark on "z Systems" and on "System z." If I were an > IBM trademark lawyer I would be taking a very long, hard look at HP Z. > Are trademarks case-sensitive? I've long wondered about "zFS" vs. "ZFS" (GIYF). I don't know that either is trademarked, and I'm not allowed to do searches in such areas. I know that The Workstation Group is constrained to use "Uni-XEDIT" in order to avoid infringing on IBM's "XEDIT". Does "HP Z" likewise avoid infringing on "Z"? Can one trademark a single letter? I believe it's impossible to trademark any simple number ("9672"? "3390"?). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
