“Windows, one of the best-known trademarks in the world, may not be a name Microsoft Corp. can own and use exclusively, a federal judge ruled yesterday. In a narrow, preliminary ruling that could change at trial, Chief U.S. District Judge John Coughenour wrote that there are “serious questions regarding whether ‘Windows’ is a non-generic name and thus eligible for the protections of federal trademark law.” This probably means that Lindows won the case and they would be able to continue use the Lindows.com name. Read the report at NWSource.com.
Ruling Questions Protected Use of the Name Windows
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Eugenia Loli
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Maybe MS should have stuck with the original name they came up with: INTERFACE MANAGER
Thats MUCH more creative, eh? ;-P
Maybe it’s about time commonsense finally arrived in trademark law.
Lindows won in a preliminary injunction hearing, not the actual trial (which will take forever and will cost lindows a bundle of money). The trial will go before another judge (so what this judge thinks doesn’t really matter).
Meanwhile, WINE is changing its licensing terms because they felt lindows weren’t sharing the improvements with the WINE community. Certain Linux and open source websites won’t even run this news item because they think lindows is pure vapourware.
The beta wasnt exactly impressive….
The stuff of M$ is always beta … and I was never impressed … always DEpressed by M$.Lindows has to go a long way. I wonder if Lindows will succeed. Maybe AmigaDE will lead the way to platform independency.
Dependence on AmigaDE is not platform independence.
This whole thing reminds me of how OJ Simpson tried to trademark “OJ”. I think it was trademark, maybe I’m thinking of copyright? Anyhow…
That is completly unrelated, and though I don’t know what he exactly pretended, he could have trademarked OJ for any goods or services where it wasn’t trademarked already. Trademarks do not cover everything (all goods and services), unless succesfuly registered for everything (rare) and/or in case of very highly known TMs like Coca-Cola or Rolls Royce.
OJ is not generic nor descriptive for any good or service to my knowledge. Under some TM laws however, prior to registering you need the authorization of a person’s characteristic name that has become famous.
When you think of the Microsoft Windows case, it is very simple to avoid confusion with unrelated intellectual property cases, just think of the original ‘Windows’, that is Xerox ‘Windows Menus Icons Pointers’: WIMP, the modern windowing system. I wouldn’t say ‘Windows’ is a generic, but a directly descriptive term, and used before in the same trade. Generic or Descriptive, we’ll found out soon.
Damn, ‘completely’, I have to start using my Boxer spell checker.
BAC Windows
Anglian Windows
There are probably too many Windows. Windows has always been a generic word, why decide now?