Alan,
>> Which trademark law are you violating by having that in a directory
>> name path, which you are not also violating by having it in the
>> kernel source, make config, name of the module and its printk()
>> on load, etc. etc.
>
> You can change all the other names with almost zero impact
Ah - OK; dname/dt didn't occur to me, but still this is
a consequence of a violation, not the violation itself; what
aspect of trademark law is a problem?
There are a few other examples of this. /proc/cpuinfo has
shed[amb].121$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
...
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
...
model name : Pentium III (Coppermine)
That's 2, if not 3 trademarks without acknowledgement that
might be searched for by userspace programs.
The solution is presumably that lanana doesn't accept /registered/
trademarks without a GPL compatible license from the trademark
holder. I don't believe you would have too much of a problem
with unregistered trademarks.
In any case, most trademark law has some concept of 'fair use'.
See the difficulty many trademark holders have in suing
registrants of [trademark]sucks.[registrysuffix]. I think
the use in terms of supporting hardware is pretty
fair. Cloning competing OS functionality is closer to
the wind I admit.
(Only tangentially relevant but for amusement value and a
beautifully argued case read
http://arbiter.wipo.int/domains/decisions/html/2001/d2001-0918.html
enjoyment almost guaranteed
)
-- Alex Bligh - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Nov 23 2001 - 21:00:21 EST