Here's what I wrote earlier this morning:
Shane Curcuru asked: > - What are the risks in allowing the Apache Pivot project in keeping > their name? This is not the right question to discuss off the legal-internal list without explicit attorney-client privilege. However, there is nothing stopping us from writing to Microsoft to say: We note that you have filed in the USPTO to register a trademark on "PIVOT" (serial number 77859890). Please be aware that Apache Software Foundation has been using the trademark PIVOT for our own software. See http://incubator.apache.org/pivot/. Precede this with an appropriate greeting and add a gracious closing. I would then leave it up to Microsoft's own attorneys to answer your question for themselves. I recommend that such a letter come from me as your attorney directly to the deputy general counsel of Microsoft (whom I know personally, and since I don't know the name of the head of their trademark department who reports to him). I'm sure it will not cause a ruckus, merely careful rethinking of their trademark application. Another thing it will do is to make Microsoft attorneys more aware that ASF is a powerhouse of trademarked software. Is that what you want? /Larry From: Todd Volkert [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 11:45 AM To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected]; ASF Team PRC; [email protected] Subject: Re: ASF Board Meeting Summary - December 16, 2009 I would suggest following the advice of counsel (Larry) as a first step. Sorry for asking people to repeat themselves, but the only email I saw from Larry was the "WTF" email (I'm subscribed to legal-discuss, trademarks, and pivot-dev) -- what advice should we be following? -T
