IPKat

That seems pretty normal to me. Try this thought experiment. Suppose I make an accessory that adds an ironing board to the back of F150 trucks[1] and I call my company “Fordboard”? Do you think that portmanteau is a trademark violation or not? I think Ford probably would fight and win against me if I did such a thing, in particular because I am using the registered mark (Ford) to refer to the actual thing so I can’t pretend that’s just a coincidence. That is also the case here with gitclassic. If I called my guitar shop that I might have more of a leg to stand on. There’s more discussion of the legal aspects of portmanteau words here https://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2020/07/almost-everything-you-want-to-kn… [1] I didn’t say it’s a good business idea, I came up with the portmanteau first.

http://archive.epo.org/epo/pubs/oj007/11_07/11_5947.pdf The above link gives details over the approach taken by the EPO, giving examples of pure software patents which were rejected whilst also illustrating the approach taken to granted patents in the area. My understanding is that software in its own right cannot be patented but where software is incorporated into a specific product to provide functionality it can be patented. /edit The following link also provides good information. Essentially, the barrier is very low to establishing that a software patent achieves a technical measure and falls outside the exception. For example in HTC v Apple, a lower court judge found a multi-touch related patent invalid as a computer programme, however a higher court overturned this ruling. http://ipkitten.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/from-alice-to-apple-patentable-…

Apparently the story there is a little more complicated that just being sued for using silence. The composer of the new piece was intending to challenge / satirise copyright law, and actually credited Cage as a coauthor. https://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2012/04/price-of-silence-and-myth-of-bat…

And the thing that matters isn't mentioned by BBC? Was it a public post or private? BBC doesn't even seem to understand the issue at hand. Public/The court didn't know - http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2020/05/privacy-rights-and-social-media-c…

Fun story about this: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2017/08/when-mayo-is-not-manyonnaise-yet-…

More technical (and sceptical) discussion: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2019/12/epo-refuses-ai-inventor-applicati… http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-first-ai-inventor-ipkat-searc…

In Germany, the country in question here, the current stance of the federal supreme court (links to Wikipedia case below, ruling is dated 12/2018) seems to be that even photography of public domain works can retain copyright with the museum. To be clear, I find both that stance and the behaviour of the organisation behind the museum appaling but I'm really not sure how US copyright law or unrealized EU directives are all that relevant. Intellectual property rights in Germany are complicated and when in doubt usually err on the side of copyright holders. http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2019/02/digitized-images-of-works-in-publ… https://dejure.org/dienste/vernetzung/rechtsprechung?Text=I%20ZR%20104…

Not so simple: https://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2016/09/breaking-cjeu-says-that-free-wi-…

Here's a better link from a collective of European IP lawyers. The point is that McDonald's was assuming it would be treated differently than any smaller company, and also that the Big Mac trademark might have been too broad to begin with, but this was not the decisive factor. http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2019/01/euipo-cancels-mcdonalds-big-mac-t…

To be fair, the law seems to be quite a bit more specific than that. It applies to commercial use of models "whose physical appearance has been modified through the use of image processing software to slim down or thicken the model's silhouette" according to the translation on this site. [1] [1] http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2017/08/france-photoshop-decree-coming-up…

> I have not read the fine print of all of this so my idea here may be dead in the water... Many commercial software patent licensing agreements for at least the last twenty years (the timeframe I've noticed contracts tend to have realized open source and networks are a thing) have clauses that specifically prevent or limit this, called "preemptive sublicensing restrictions": https://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2019/10/sublicensing-considerations-in-s… In the "fine print" of the Thread agreements including IP agreement -- reading not very closely and while commenting here -- they ensure this a little obliquely: https://www.threadgroup.org/Becomemember In the various agreements they've defined Implementor as what you need to, well, implement it, and it does allow sublicensing to affiliates, but separates out Participants and Associates from Affiliates, and puts a high bar on what can be an Affiliate. Based on the provided definition of "Affiliate" in the context of the Thread Group, Inc. Implementer Participation Agreement, an Implementer cannot simply sign agreements with third parties to make them "Affiliates" in order to sublicense the Implementer's license. According to the definition, an "Affiliate" must be a corporation, company, or other entity that either owns or controls the Implementer, is owned or controlled by the Implementer, or is under common control with the Implementer, with a significant threshold of more than fifty percent ownership or…

Klingon has a much more complicated history than this. The usage of Klingon is higher than many of the obscure things encoded in Unicode, so that's not the full reason. The real reason is most likely that Paramount considers the Klingon language its intellectual property and has attempted to enforce it[1]. Thus, I believe the official position of the Unicode consortium is that Klingon is written in Latin script but with a Klingon font (ie is basically a simple substitution cipher with a handful of ligatures), which satisfies everybody except for those who want Klingon included in Unicode. ETA: The proposal[2] has been revived recently, and in the committee meeting[3], they're clear that the blocker is legal. [1] https://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2016/05/to-boldly-go-where-no-copyright-… [2]: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20181-klingon.pdf [3]: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20169-script-adhoc-rept.pdf