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Re: Some Comments [was Re: Article for Slashdot]
On Wed, 9 Sep 1998, Stanislav Malyshev a.k.a Frodo wrote:
> > Let's not mislead the innocent. Visual-J++ is NOT JAVA!!
> > (Was already settled in Federal Court a year ago).
>
> Well, it seems a bit weird to me that Federal Court can define what is
> Java and what isn't... Some people in some big country are just crazy on
> lawyers and courts, I fear.
I think that it's about time people understand that a Trademark is a
Trademark for the specific purpose of protecting any good name someone may
associate with it over X years of gazillions of PR and ad money. So if
someone comes and says, hey, my brilliant product X++ replaces your
sucking product Y, everything is kosher. If he says, hovewer that X++ IS Y
then he is breaking the Trademark law and is doing something called
misrepresentation or such (I'm not a lawyer). You can count on the Redmond
based firm to do that plenty, although they used to steer clear of it in
the past (or rather used to word it more carefully).
For as long as Sun owns the Trademark Java, NOBODY is going to call a
programming language Java or pretend that its product is Java without
crossing paragraphs with them in a court.
No court will ever decide what people think, but it can decide what a
product is called by name by whom as long as that name is protected by a
Trademark.
And you can count on everybody trying to attack M$ on slanted wording and
misrepresentation attempts of other's products, so be glad there is a
place on this planet where one can do something about this, and win.
Peter (not a lawyer)