Filing an "intent-to-use" trademark registration is a common practice to
smoke out potential "prior users" before committing to the use of a
tradename. Whether Cornell/UoV have any prior user right is to be
determined by the Patent and Trademark Office, or, if things get ugly,
by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (at Washington, DC).
However, as I understand it, RedHat has already told Cornell/UoV that it
will not interfere with their continued use of the Fedora name. Since
Cornell/UoV had never taken any positive step to protect the use of the
Federo name, until after RedHat filed for the trademark registration, I
doubt they will get anything better than such a current use right, even
if an opposition is filed.
I was reading Sunday's StarBulletin (the "Raising Cane" column). Our
Honolulu City Prosecutor's Office decided to prosecute a criminal case
against a Waikiki resident who was accused by his neighbor of attempting
to steal his Sunday newspaper. For petty offenses, almost no one would
bother to put up a big fight, and prosecutors can be almost always
assured to claim a "WIN" (capital letters) and improve their win/lose
ratio. Whether cases like this should be prosecuted is decided by their
supervisors. This story says a lot about the character, or lack
thereof, of those top brasses at our City Prosecutor's Office. Wasting
our prescious resources on those petty offenses has its victim--91% of
our major crimes are unsolved. One reason is that some police believe
that our prosecutor's office often demonstrated that it lacked the
resources to prosecute major crimes even if they were solved. Of
course, if only 9% of the major crimes are solved, our prosecutor's
office has not much to do but prosecuting a $1.75 attempt theft and jay
walkings.
Back to the main issue. Nowhere have I found which indicated that
Cornell or UoV itself is making any official comment. Until that
happens (and I am very positive that both universities have better
management team than our Prosecutor's Office), any discussion is
probably premature. wayne
Warren Togami wrote:
On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 21:27, Ho'ala Greevy wrote:
Warren & fellow Fedorians,
just read this off slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/20/1722215
any updates you can glean for us?
thx,
Ho'ala
Cornell/UoV is telling only one side of the story, which is a half-truth
at best.
http://www.fedora.us/pipermail/fedora-devel/2003-November/002346.html
A few facts passed along from legal
http://www.fedora.us/pipermail/fedora-devel/2003-November/002347.html
One more bit of info that *was* public in the past if you paid attention
to fedora.redhat.com and fedora.info sites.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=86544&cid=7523611
Alan Cox weighs in
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=86544&cid=7522341
Some other guy weighs in
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/1120reseadispu.html
Apparently IDG News interviewed Red Hat's general counsel about this.
The only people that know all details about the initial consent from
fedora.info and what happened are RH's lawyers and the fedora.info
folks. I suppose this means we'll be hearing more about this story as
it unfolds.
Warren
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