While I definitely see your point, I do think MAMEdev have overstepped their rights a bit with the two restrictions I mentioned above (not using MAME in the title and only using MAME once in the description).
IANAL, but as long as they acknowlege your trademark, it seems that a vendor of a legal product should be able to mention that their product is compatible with MAME, even in the title of their auction, and even if they say it more than once. (I've never heard of either of these restrictions in fair use before).
I know it may feel like vendors are using you and the MAMEdev team for profit purposes, but there is a large community built up around your efforts, and to squash legal products that do no harm to the MAME effort is a bit excessive.
In addition, your "ebay sweep" killing all these auctions without any prior notice seems a bit harsh, as well.
I hope that you'll reconsider and revise those two restrictions.
Kevin
Well I had nothing to do with the writing of the list of restrictions, however they do seem reasonable to me.
Mentioning MAME once, fair enough, I've seen several spammy auctions with MAME plastered all over them, it gives a false impression that the product is something we endorse when in most cases its just spam (and we all hate spam..)
I believe there was prior notice as mamedev.com has been up a while, including the trademark rules, however I will acknowledge some people may not have been aware of it.
You talk about a large community, unfortunately a significant part of the community does not seem to have our best interests at heart. If more effort was put in to shutting down those abusing the MAME name things may not have come to this. I only have to look at the adverts on this forum and I see 'MAME ROM DVDs' for sale. We spent a great deal of time and effort filtering these out over at mame.net but it seems the majority don't care to do so and such businesses, and adverts do pose a threat to ourselves and the integrity of the MAME name and project.
At the end of the day a bit of bad comes with every bit of good. All the developers are human, and have lives to live, and we don't want to have to live in fear of legal action being taken because a community has turned MAME into seemingly nothing more (in the eyes of those higher up) than a large profit making market based around selling illegal products. At that point the risk of working on MAME becomes too high. Unfortunately many of the arcade cabinets being sold, or for which 'MAME' parts are being sold end up being used for commercial purposes, this is likewise a problem.
With that in mind we simply need to establish MAME for what it is, allowing the name to only be used for things which really are MAME (ie the actual emulator)
Please read Aaron's reply over at mame.net
http://www.mame.net/cgi-bin/wwwthreads/showpost.pl?Board=mamegeneral&Number=174573Anyway, I hope you can understand our situation as developers and why we feel the need to protect the MAME name before the situation gets even more out of control that it already is.