Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ExiledinElysium" data-source="post: 5078003" data-attributes="member: 74604">I'm just gonna concede this.  I have no personal knowledge of whether it was a term used prior to Lone Wolf's product.  I committed the deplorable fallacy of taking an assertion of several other people as fact.  A few people on this thread have noted hearing the term as far back as the 80's.  I don't know if that's true, but it doesn't sound like a stretch to me.  The only personal knowledge I have is that I heard the term very early on in my Warhammer career, but never knew it was a product title.  In my mind, the fact that it never occurred to me that "army builder" might be the title of a intellectual property should be evidence in support of the proposition that it's too generic to be trademarked.  This sort of thing wouldn't have happened if the software had a name that sounded like a name.  If it was called "List Nexus" or "Roster Monster" or anything else that sounds like something other than an intuitive and simple way to describe the product, I would have asked "what is that?" and would summarily have discovered the product with that title.On that note, I'm pretty sure (though I could certainly be wrong) that the USPTO doesn't actually assess the validity of trademarks being registered.  It seems intuitively stupid that they wouldn't, but given what I've learned about the structure of the American legal system it makes sense.  In this country, the law (especially property law) doesn't really matter until there's a dispute about it.  This is evidenced in things like the constitutional requirement of ripeness, and the several Supreme Court decisions disavowing the Court's ability to give advisory opinions.  In the eyes of the Supreme Court, the judiciary isn't allowed to render a decision unless there is real concrete present controversy.  As a result of this, we have things like the patent office not assessing whether a trademark is generic or not.  If someone contests a particular mark's right to be a mark, a judge will have to investigate and decide, but until then it's nobody's problem.Additionally, it seems to me that your employers just kinda got lucky.  No other companies happened to contest "Army Builder," but that's probably because they didn't know the trademark had been registered and had no interest in using the phrase themselves since they had their own unique product names.  If there were no other companies, then you just have a firm waving the legal stick at a bunch of nerds with mad excel skillz.  That's great that Lone Wolf contacted all these small time developers and asked them to remove infringing content, but that's not a real test of the trademark's validity.  None of those guys would even consider taking the issue to court to claim the mark is generic, since they don't know anything about IP law.  They just get a notice from a company threatening legal action, and since they have no economic interest in what they've produced, the only sensible thing to do is comply.  If an IP lawyer had been made aware of these small time cease and desist notices you talk about, I think we'd be looking at a different situation today.  I know if this sort of thing were to happen in two years once I pass the Bar, I would file a dispute in a heartbeat.  The fact that Lone Wolf is now trying to police this trademark wholesale now with their "incontestable trademark" certification feels a little ridiculous.moving on...Maybe I'm getting confused.  How would you describe the concern about genericization of a trademark as anything other than a desire to prevent people from using the term descriptively?  I don't know if we're just quibbling about the word 'demand,' but it seems to me that Lone Wolf is suggesting that Privateer is legally required to remove these descriptive generic uses of the term from their forum.  I understand the fact that Lone Wolf wants people to associate the term with their product, and would like to prevent genericization of their trademark (more on that in a minute), but where does trademark law say a company is allowed to impress/draft another company in their education effort.  Why should Privateer have to help Lone Wolf educate the public?  Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it is so far my understanding that the letter/email threatened legal action if Privateer didn't remove both kinds of improper use of the term.Finally, why would it be so terrible in theory for a company's product name to become synonymous with the function?  The fact that people came to associate Xerox with photocopying in general is a testament to the awesomeness that was/is Xerox, isn't it?  Isn't the fact that we now have a drink flavor called "cola" just evidence that Coke was a really popular and successful product?  Has the existence of RC Cola hurt Coke at all?  Not anymore than any normal economic competition.  Does it hurt Google when people say "I'm gonna Google that" then do a search on their preferred engine, Yahoo?  Not at all; even if you educated them, all that would change is they would say "I'm gonna Yahoo that" before they get on their computer.  On the other hand, the simple fact that your product has become the name of that product type gives you enormous market power (as a sidenote, I do have an economics degree so I'm not just talking out my rear).  If someone wants to buy an army builder program, and they search that and find out that there's a program actually called Army Builder, you can bet your flaming hairpiece they're much more likely to purchase your product than that of a competitor.So here's where this get's lame.  What we're talking about isn't economic competition.  Nobody is profiting off the use of "Army Builder" to refer to some dude's excel sheet.  How is Lone Wolf being harmed?  Maybe I'm being stubborn, but I see about as much real damage here as I do in the Feminist Language Critique.  In other words, zero.  If you want to talk about whether Lone Wolf is harmed by the existence of 'some dudes excel sheet' at all, that's a different story entirely.  It sucks for your boss that Jim Schmo is competing with Army Builder, but that's going to happen regardless of whether people call it Jim's Army Builder or Jim's Roster Monster, and it's going to happen regardless of whether people refer to army roster construction tools in general as army builders.Cheers,Kyle</blockquote>

Verification