[Mageia-discuss] Google, yahoo, Hotmail and Flickr accounts

[Marc Paré]

Le 2010-09-21 17:30, Wolfgang Bornath a écrit :
> 2010/9/21 atilla ontas<tarakbumba at gmail.com>:
>> Im a lawyer, altough i dont know US or EU laws; i think it will be a
>> legal problem like Mandrake name case. We should immediately need to
>> consider this. Also even name is not a legal matter than domain names
>> could be give us headache.
>
> Yes, it depends on the company and if there is an underpaid lawyer
> around (no offense meant, atilla).
>
> A friend owning 'mobilix.de', dealing with Linux on mobile devices was
> sued by the company which has the right son the famous "Asterix"
> comics, where the second main character is named "Obelix". He lost the
> case all the way up to the highest court although comics have nothing
> in common with serious computer work (oh, ok, except UserFriendly)..

This makes sense as "Mobilix" is a coined cartooned character that was 
copywritten by the "Asterix" comic strip owners. However, I don't 
believe that you can copyright dictionary words such as "mageia". You 
can complain though if your use of the word "Mageia" is in conflict with 
another use of "Mageia" that is close to your original registered use. 
For example, if mageia.com were a software/OS company, then their 
complaints may hold value. However, there is quite a difference between 
a minerals company and a linux software company. You would have a hard 
time convincing any person that Mageia.org was infringing and impacting 
your business. For that matter, any going concern (business) these days 
know that if you are going to set up a business and that you wish to use 
the internet, you register the TLD's (top level domain names) at the 
very outset. Therefore, if "mageia.com" were serious in using their web 
presence, they would have gobbled up the mageia.com/net/org/localized 
country name set. This was obviously not the case.

Marc