[Libre-soc-dev] Finishing off the grant: gigabit crypto router 2021-02-052

[Jacob Lifshay]

On Thu, Apr 18, 2024, 10:34 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton via Libre-soc-dev <
libre-soc-dev at lists.libre-soc.org> wrote:

> * CALDERWOOD and LEWIS believe that they are entitled to the
>  Trademark that is in effect identical to Simple-V (TM),
>  which is simple straight theft.
>

Disclaimer: i'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

Afaik that's not how trademarks work, you trademark the name and logos and
stuff like that, not the documentation and source code and specification of
an instruction set (that's covered by copyrights and patents and things
other than trademarks).

The whole point of trademarks is so people buying stuff know who it comes
from, not what it is made of.

This is why previously you could get a web browser named iceweasel even
though >99.9% of the code is identical to firefox, because mozilla didn't
allow using the trademark, but the source code wasn't what the trademark
covered, the names and logos (and colors?) were.

RED didn't take the SimpleV trademark since they're not using that name.
VISC is a different trademark that afaik has always been owned by RED, so
them using VISC is no problem.

Jacob