Re: On not using (r) and (tm)

[John Levine <johnl at iecc.com>]

>But why should all trademarks in a document necessarily be marked?

As Paul says, they shouldn't.  

The practice of acknowledging other people's trademarks is a cargo
cult practice that originated in the 1970s.  The contract that
universities signed with AT&T to get the cheap UNIX license included a
clause that required the contracting universities to acknowledge
AT&T's trademark claim on UNIX.  Then a generation of comp sci grads,
not knowing that those UNIX(tm) references were due to a specific
contract with a particular vendor, leapt to the unwarranted conclusion
that all trademarks should be acknowledged, and invented various
imaginative theories to justify that conclusion.

>My point is this: Identifying and acknowledging trademarks waste
>time, don't do it.

What he said.  I've published a lot of books, and the most we ever did
was to capitalize terms we believed were claimed as trademarks, as a
courtesy to the vendors whose software we were writing about.

Incidentally, (r) and (tm) are cargo cults, too.  US trademark law
says in 22 USC 1111 that you can give notice of a trademark
registration

  by displaying with the mark the words `Registered in U.S. Patent and
  Trademark Office' or `Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off.' or the letter R
  enclosed within a circle,

But it definitely does not say that (r) is an adequate substitute for
R in a circle, nor does it say anything about tm in a circle, parens,
or anything else.  For copyright fans, 17 USC 401 describes the form
of a copyright notice including C in a circle, but (c) is not an
adequate substitute.

In some cases, document authors may wish to note trademarks that they
or their own employers claim.  In that case I would suggest that they
still don't get to put (r) or (tm) in the text, but in the goop at the
end of the document they MAY put a sentence or two like this:

 KLUDGE is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by the
 Kludge Computer Corp.

or

 KLUDGE is claimed as a trademark by the Kludge Computer Corp.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor
"A book is a sneeze." - E.B. White, on the writing of Charlotte's Web





_______________________________________________
Ipr-wg mailing list
Ipr-wg at ietf.org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipr-wg