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MAMEdev is Pulling Auctions!

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Chris:


--- Quote from: Crazy Cooter on June 04, 2005, 04:08:04 pm ---Chris, Once the "TM" has been placed, all rights go to the person that put the TM next to it.
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Tiger-Heli:


--- Quote from: Chris on June 04, 2005, 04:14:03 pm ---
--- Quote from: Crazy Cooter on June 04, 2005, 04:08:04 pm ---Chris, Once the "TM" has been placed, all rights go to the person that put the TM next to it.  Until it is "disproved" by the USPTO, that person has every right to enforce their claim to it's use.  It doesn't have to be a "registered" trademark.

"Any time you claim rights in a mark, you may use the "TM" (trademark) or "SM" (service mark) designation to alert the public to your claim, regardless of whether you have filed an application with the USPTO. However, you may use the federal registration symbol "
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Chris:


--- Quote from: Tiger-Heli on June 04, 2005, 04:20:55 pm ---That says they can use the trademark, which means they can enforce the trademark.

It wouldn't do Ford (TM?) much good to Trademark the Blue oval and silver script if I could just put a blue oval and silver Ford script on my product with a TM after it and sell it.

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The word Ford appears in over 4000 categories on eBay.

Tiger-Heli:


--- Quote from: Chris on June 04, 2005, 04:25:42 pm ---
--- Quote from: Tiger-Heli on June 04, 2005, 04:20:55 pm ---That says they can use the trademark, which means they can enforce the trademark.

It wouldn't do Ford (TM?) much good to Trademark the Blue oval and silver script if I could just put a blue oval and silver Ford script on my product with a TM after it and sell it.

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The word Ford appears in over 4000 categories on eBay.  There are too many results for it to actually return the number of auctions that use Ford as a keyword.  None of the auction titles use a oval logo on them.

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And I believe that if Ford so chose (and thought it was profitable for them to), they could go after any and all of them for trademark violation, especially if they had from the iniitiation of the trademark taken litigation to prevent it's usage in the title of E-bay auctions (which they obviously haven't, but MAME has).

IMNAL, though.

Chris:


--- Quote from: Tiger-Heli on June 04, 2005, 04:30:33 pm ---And I believe that if Ford so chose (and thought it was profitable for them to), they could go after any and all of them for trademark violation, especially if they had from the iniitiation of the trademark taken litigation to prevent it's usage in the title of E-bay auctions (which they obviously haven't, but MAME has).

IMNAL, though.

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Having a trademark doesn't give you the absolute right to control every form in which a word appears.

Specifically:

- The MAME trademark is limited to software, according to the category Nicola filed in.  Aaron can't do a DAMN THING about a hardware only auction, like a button or a joystick. He is only succeeding because eBay will err on the side of caution and approve almost any VeRO complaint.

- Trademarks have to be used in commerce.  MAME is free.  When the mark is published for opposition, any of the numerous people he's pissed off can probably kill the application.  He could probably get it approved as a service mark instead of a trademark, but he'll probably have to start over again.

- There are fair-use allowances for using a trademark even against that entity's wishes.    It's what keeps Microsoft from being able to have a bad review of Windows from being yanked from a Linux magazine, and what keeps Coke from preventing the use of their logo in a Pepsi commercial.

--Chris

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