Fedora Dispute

[Matthew Miller]

On Sun, May 08, 2005 at 08:48:55AM -0500, Thomas Cameron wrote:
> Red Hat is trademarking Fedora *as it relates to a Linux operating system 
> distribution.*  Red Hat admits that Cornell/UVA have prior use and are not 
[...]
> The Cornell/UVA folks and some people in the community are making more of 
> this than they need to.  Red Hat is not the villain here.  They are just 
> trying to protect the hard work they're doing with the Fedora distribution. 
> They have no desire to impinge on the Cornell/UVA folks, and it is a pretty 
> wild stretch of the imagination that this would ever happen.

To me and you there isn't. To US trademark law, I don't think it's so clear.
Trademarks need to be unique within one of the 45 official international
classes of goods and services -- and class 42 is:

   CLASS 42 (Computer, scientific & legal)

   Scientific and technological services and research and design relating
   thereto: industrial analysis and research services; design and
   development of computer hardware and software; legal services.

So, not only are operating systems and digital content management systems
not legally distinct, we're not even particularly distinct from any other
scientific services, or from legal services -- all the same thing as far as
trademark distinctiveness goes.


-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>
Current office temperature: 73 degrees Fahrenheit.