Google| Subject | Re: Calumet files Chapter 7 |
| From | Sandman |
| Date | 2014-04-05 18:07 (2014-04-05 18:07) |
| Message-ID | <slrnlk0alb.aej.mr@irc.sandman.net> |
| Client | |
| Newsgroups | rec.photo.digital |
| Follows | Tony Cooper |
| Followups | Tony Cooper (4h & 10m) > Sandman |
In article <8070k99hl7asj5s54eif3hf9gco981q58p@4ax.com>, Tony Cooper wrote:
And how do they enforce it?SandmanTony Cooper
I'm a bit unsure whether or not you mean that only the company Adobe have legal right to call third party plugins "Photoshop plugins", where the third party plugin developers musyt change the order of the words and add a "for" to be legally valid.
You shouldn't be unsure. "Photoshop" is a registered trademark of Adobe. That's legal protection. How that registered trademark is used is up to Adobe to enforce.
Adobe apparently doesn't pursue infringements.Infringements according to whom?
The availability of plug-ins are beneficial to Adobe because it makes Photoshop a more useful program and more desired. It would be costly for Adobe to crack down. That doesn't mean that they don't have the legal right to do so.According to what law?
If you develop a flavoring that can be added to Coca Cola, and call it a "Coca Cola Flavoring", Cocoa Cola would most probably take legal action.On what do you base this theory? What if I were to post a "Photoshop tutorial", or hold a "Photoshop class"? Same thing, according to you?
What about other instances where a manufacturer encourages third party solutions for their products, say.. Apple? So Apple owns the trademark "iPad", right, so the only "iPad dock" would be one made by Apple - no one other than Apple "can" say "iPad dock"?
For the record - I am totally with your line of thought, what I am questioning is the entire "can". Anyone can call a plugin a "Photoshop plugin" and Adobe can do nothing about it. And it is my position that they don't want to do anything about it.
They've shown that they make an effort to protect their trademarked name by forcing restaurants in the US to say "We serve (name of beverage)" if the customer orders a "Coke" or a "Coca Cola" and the restaurant only serves Pepsi or some other beverage.Indeed - but that was in order to enforce the brand where "Coke" could refer to a competing brand. It would be applicable here if "plugin" was a common word that people usually connected with Photoshop but used it for other cases as well.
Apple attempted a "get tough" policy with "App Store", but abandoned it.Again, not towards their third party developers who they very much encourage to refer to the App Store as... the App Store.
In fact, you make quite the opposite case here. If third party developers were to only call their software "plugins", then Adobe would probably want to encourage them to include their trademarked name in the moniker as well - to ensure branding. In short, a developer that calls his software "Photoshop plugin" strengthes the brand.
The reason that firms take action to protect their trademark is to prevent that trademark from becoming a generic term as happened to the makers of aspirin, escalator, thermos, and many other products.Indeed. "Photoshop plugin" is not such a case, however, since it does not encourage a generic usage of the brand name. Quite the opposite.
Adobe does not want "Photoshop" to become a generic term for "image processing software", but they have to balance their need to protect with the benefits of allowing the erroneous usage to continue.But we're not discussing the "errroneous" usage of "Photoshop" to refer to "image processing software".
I see you forgot to append any substantiation for your position in this post as well. So you're firmly set with a big fat zero for your claim.SandmanTony Cooper
And, as stated, so far you have provided nothing to counter this but meaningless words.
In your opinion, but then we know that understanding words is not your forte. nospam also argues with the premise, but his defense is "everybody does it" or something like that.
-- Sandman[.net]
2014-03-13-
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