I hate to wade into mud wrestling matches. But for every one who is on
their high horse about being pristine in our non-use of any possible
trademarked items ... have you browsed through our aircraft? We have
liveries from just about every airline imaginable, past and present.
What I don't like to hear is arguments along the line of: person "A" can't
submit anything that could ever possibly be a trademark infraction by
anyone's estimation, but person "B" we will let get away with it. Oh and by
the way, we really should go through our repository and clean out any
possible trademark infringements ... maybe some day.
First of all this smacks of targeting or interpreting our policy differently
for different people... and that usually is done on the basis of some other
agenda. Maybe the person in question has invited some of this, maybe they
haven't, but applying our policies in different measures to different people
can quickly get petty and immature.
Second, saying that "oh I wish we'd retroactively fix our repository to
honor this policy perfectly", and then doing nothing about it also is really
weak. It sounds good on the face of it, but at the end of the day what
matters is action, not words.
I think it's pretty accepted that flight simulators can reproduce company
liveries in the process of realistically modeling the world. I know that
has been widely debated (AA, et. al) but the reality is that people are
creating liveries of all kinds of companies all the time.
Where do we draw the lines? Is it ok to reproduce an airline livery, but
not some other company livery? As far as I can tell the people arguing that
we can't have a red bull logo are on really shaky ground from a
"consistency" perspective.
Do you want to argue this from a legal standpoint? Do we only include
anything that we have written permission from the original company to use?
In that case probably we'll have to rip out half of our simulator. How far
do we want to take it? Do you think aircraft manufacturers have given us
explicit permission to replicate their designs? Aircraft systems and
cockpit displays? Tire manufacturers? ACME rivet company? I've got
nothing on file from them. Building shapes and names and logos? If we have
to get written permssion to replicate anything, then we might as well pack
it all up and go home, as should every other simulator developer.
I only wade in because this whole thing smacks of a pissing match and I get
strong indication that our policies are being selectively interpreted by
some to gain an advantage in this stupid pissing match and not for the
benefit and quality and safety of the FlightGear project itself.
Thank you,
Curt.
On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 9:12 AM, Reagan Thomas wrote:
> On 2/15/2011 8:27 PM, Arnt Karlsen wrote:
> > On Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:50:36 -0800, Jack wrote in message
> > <72e5b800-d213-466d-bf46-c3d33d4ae...@gmail.com>:
> >
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> The Red Bull livery has been removed from this release.
> >>
> >> Download: http://jackmermod.bplaced.net/Files/cobra21511.zip
> >>
> >> I find it ridiculous and a bit immature how Oliver people whine
> >> about a simple logo.
> >>
> >> If Oliver really cared about preventing fictitious lawsuits as he
> >> claims to, he would concentrate his efforts on the several red bull
> >> logos that are already in our database.
> > .._where_?
> >
> >> If this thread is further interfered with, I will be forced to
> >> result to more forceful methods of having my work committed, or I may
> >> very well change the license back to the CC license and our community
> >> will have missed out on a very high quality aircraft.
> >>
> >> Regards,
> >> Jack
> >
> > ..now, imagine where _we_ would have been if tSCOG _had_ a case
> > against Big Blue. You would have had to pay tSCOG US $1499
> > (or whatever it was) for every thread in your cpu. They were
> > targeting GPL code, and the GPL itself, as anti-American.
> >
> > ..even as we celebrate the approaching conclusion of:
> > http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110215183557939 in
> > http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20040319041857760
> > it is _just_ a side show. http://groklaw.net/ has waaay more.
> >
> Jack,
>
> You know who takes trademark law seriously? Trademark owners.
>
> An owner must protect their trademarks from being used in ways that
> decrease the value to them. This tends to be two areas, one very
> specific and the other kind of broad. The first thing they must protect
> against is their trademark becoming generic; if everyone refers to an
> adhesive bandage as a "Band-Aid", then Johnson and Johnson, who owns
> that trademark, runs the risk of losing the exclusive use of it. In
> fact, they made their advertising jingle many years ago to include
> "stuck on Band-Aid brand" as a very public way of asserting their
> ownership of the brand. Did you know Otis Elevator company came up with
> and trademarked the name "escalator"? They did not actively (enough)
> assert their ownership of that trademark and have lost any rights of
> exclusivity to it. It is now a generic term that any company can use to
> refer to stairs that move or anything else, for that matter. In these
> cases, it is an *urgent* obligation of the trademark owner to sue the
> pants off of any infringer.
>
> The remaining broad category is your trademark being used in any other
> way that decreases its value to you. This can be using it to refer to
> products or things it isn't intended to be associated with, removing the
> focus from the owner's product(s). Worse are cases where a trademark is
> used in ways that are harmful to the image of the owner or the owner's
> products.
>
> A hopefully imaginary example here might be the questionable marketing
> practices of certain people who are selling FlightGear to the public.
> Hell, even *we* don't want to be associated with them... why would Red
> Bull (tm) like it any better? They have much more to lose, in terms of
> gross dollars, than anyone here does if their trademarks were to become
> associated with misbehavior. So, you might say, let them go after
> ProSimFraud if they are misbehaving. The ProFraudSimulator people would
> simply point to FlightGear and say, "hey this is Open Source and *they*
> did it!"
>
> This topic has come up here before and I even checked with American
> Airlines about use of their logos/trademarks. Their answer was dense
> legal talk that I roughly translated to mean "we realize we can't stop
> everybody from using our logos, but boy howdy, we have the right to kick
> your ass in court if you do it and tick us off!"
>
> How is open source Red Hat Enterprise different from open source
> CentOS? Trademarks. The words "Red Hat" and any logos owned by them
> are completely removed by the CentOS group, leaving the only
> encumbrances those obligations covered by the GPL. It's kind of neat
> that you can take a Red Hat installation, point it to a CentOS
> repository instead of the Red Hat network and have it install updates.
> When the updates are complete, Ta dah! You now have a CentOS branded
> installation. Back on point, Red Hat differentiates its products by the
> services they provide and the *trademarks* that they own. Sure, you can
> use their operating system code freely, but not their services or
> *trademarks*. Like American Airlines, they have the right to kick your
> ass in court for doing so.
>
> If the Red Bull were to get litigious on us, they'd have to put some
> names on the law suit. There isn't a FlightGear Foundation or any
> single entity responsible for FG, so right at the top of the list would
> be names near and dear to us, starting with Curtis Olson. The list of
> defendants would probably include anyone else identified as being
> responsible for the infringement, such as whoever committed the livery
> to git and whoever participated in releasing the software to the public
> in any other way. Heck, they may even remember to include Jack Mermod.
>
> We all break the law every once in a while, so let's do a risk weight
> comparison between two things that seem pretty minor: Speeding and
> trademark infringement. I often drive over 60 miles per hour in a 55
> MPH zone. My main risk is a fine that will run at most about $80 and my
> chances of getting caught are relatively low. In comparison, even
> *successfully* defending yourself from an infringement suit will run at
> least in the 10's of thousands of dollars. Oh, and given the public
> nature of the FG project, I'd guess the chance of Red Bull noticing
> trademark infringement is about 100%. Whether or not they would sue,
> don't know, but would you risk it? Should Curtis Olson risk it on your
> behalf?
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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--
Curtis Olson:
http://www.atiak.com - http://aem.umn.edu/~uav/
http://www.flightgear.org -
http://www.flightgear.org/blogs/category/curt/<http://www.flightgear.org/blogs/category/personal/curt/>
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The ultimate all-in-one performance toolkit: Intel(R) Parallel Studio XE:
Pinpoint memory and threading errors before they happen.
Find and fix more than 250 security defects in the development cycle.
Locate bottlenecks in serial and parallel code that limit performance.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devfeb
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