Re: How do YOU refer to the Palm Device?

[David Fedor]

>   IMO It's a bunch of grammatical tomfoolery to appease the legal
>beagles who are ostensibly protecting Palm's trademark.

This isn't just something that our lawyers are doing because they're
bored... this is basic trademark usage rules.  Every company in every
industry has to do the same thing, to prevent people from stealing their
name.  But yes, it is often "grammatical tomfoolery" and nitpicking; that's
the legal system for you.

The way I remember it is this: any trademarked term - whether a (R) or a
(tm) - is an adjective.  Never a noun.

Out of basic courtesy (and a lack of desire to get involved with lawyers),
if you're using someone else's name, be it company or product name,
trademarked or not, then you need to respect the way they want it used.
How would you feel if someone was using _your_ product name to do a
knock-off?  The only legal way to stop that is to enforce your trademark
usage.

And yes, we understand that some of the things in there are a mouthfull.
:-(  Sometimes you've got to grin and bear it, while working to improve
things in the future.

-David Fedor
Palm Developer Support