[OSM-talk] Fwd: Re: Recent edits in the wiki / Trademark issue

[Cartinus]

Huh?

What's really touchy is the osmf being secretive about something.

If you got a letter from some lawyer, then the only way you might get
all the volunteers in this project to comply is telling them what is
happening.


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Recent edits in the wiki / Trademark issue
Date: Fri, 01 Feb 2013 17:43:42 +0100
From: Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch>
To: cartinus at xs4all.nl


Cartinus

The location of both servers and organisation is irrelevant (as you
should know after something like 20 years of case law wrt providing
services over the Internet), relevant is that it could be construed that
the term was used by us (in a wide sense of the word) in the US and that
the trademark holder objects to such usage. Richard Fairhurst has said
the rest.

Please do not post this answer to the list, the issue is extremely touchy.

Simon

Am 01.02.2013 17:16, schrieb Cartinus:
> Plugging "google geocode trademark issue" and several variations of it
> in three different search engines didn't give any meaningful results.
>
> So unless you can explain to us why a foundation in the UK with servers
> in the UK should be bothered by a trademark conflict between two other
> parties on the other side of the Atlantic I'm going to ignore the
> request not to use the word geocode.
>
> On 02/01/2013 05:06 PM, Andreas Labres wrote:
>> On 01.02.13 16:48, Jochen Topf wrote:
>>> I don't think use of the English language is "merely incidental" to what we are
>>> doing here. Can you explain why we suddenly can't use words from the English
>>> language any more? ... And no, I don't think this is something for private emails.
>> 100% agreed.
>>
>> Simon, please be more elaborative on what's going on here. Without knowing US
>> trademark policies by heart, but "to geocode" is a generic term that cannot be
>> used as a trademark. One can of course use this term with regard to, e.g., the
>> process of transferring a postal address into geographic coordinates.
>