RE: Trademarks To clarify what I meant, this issue has come up in discussion with some very switched on people but not, I have to stress, anyone in Adobe itself. The context was people in fairly high positions, discussing the tricky problem, faced by many proprietary software makers, of how to counter OSS competition without provoking a publicity backlash; Adobe/Red5 came up as a perfect case study.
There was total agreement that the Red5 developers have been meticulous in ensuring that they didn't infringe Adobe's IP but the name itself was identified as their Achilles heal, not necessarily because it infringes a trademark or servicemark, although it may, but because it comes close enough to justify a court case. The case of a claimant against Red5 would not be strong enough to guarantee a win and, therefore, would not be worth taking UNLESS a third party anonymously funded the legal costs as a distraction/FUD tactic, just as Microsoft part-funded SCO's anti-Linux actions. This form of anonymous funding is 100% legal and very common practice among American corporations. In the case of targeting OSS projects, the presumption is that no formal structure is in place to fund a defense and that the costs will be borne by the lead developers with no prospect, in this type of action, of re-couping their costs even if they win - each side eats their own costs. This expensive process massively favors corporations and the vast majority of these disputes never make it to court, never come to public attention. As any such action would be a once-off opportunity and would be held in reserve until it can be used to maximum effect, probably after the project goes 1.0 and a lot of momentum has built up behind the disputed name - being forced to change it at that point would be a serious set-back. When the project was initially launched, I presumed that Red5 was temporary title, a cute Star Wars reference that would soon be replaced with a better name, one for which the .com was still available. I never expected it would last this long, I figured that a _______________________________________________ Red5 mailing list [email protected] http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/red5_osflash.org
