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April 30, 2006
Canton on trademarks
Canton on trademarks: Satori Canton has contributed a lot to the opensource community using Flash Platform, but here I fear he sets up a needless opposition, in assuming incoming "nutz-kicking" because an indy project had received a request to not dilute Adobe trademarks. The request came in the process of publicizing Geoff Stearn's SWFObject on the Adobe site itself (!), and the author, Geoff Stearns, noted last week that things seems resolved now. Like me, though, Geoff would still like some additional general guidance from Adobe Legal on which friendly usages risk the ability to protect each trademark. (SWFObject itself is a JavaScript library to dynamically write plugin markup in HTML, with benefits in both WWW validation and ActiveX changes.) I think over the next ten years we'll learn a lot more about how different types of groups can work together, whether ad-hoc or structured, without polarization. But it seems like this particular case is actually okay now...?
Posted by John Dowdell at April 30, 2006 12:41 PM
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Comments
It's just a little alarming to see good people/projects gone after like that. Geoff was doing something good for you guys. But, I guess, no good deed goes unpunnished.
If this is just an isolated incident that has been resolved, I guess it's not a big deal. Just seems like it could have been handled better. Let the guy pay you a dollar to license the use of the word, "Flash". Then pay the guy $20 to write the article for you.
I'm just saying it could have been handled a little better than it was. But that's just my opinion.
Posted by: Satori Canton at May 1, 2006 07:51 AM
Exactly. We all understand they own the trademark. The issue that has people worried isnt particularly about the javascript library, its about the fact that so much of the foundation of the community has been built with using names that are now Adobe trademarks in there.
And it just feels weird having had so much open info from Macromedia and its employees before, and now on an issue *potentially* with serious implications for all the Flash community we get very little info, mainly a referral to the legal terminology on the trademarks. [jd sez: Lawyers control the legal issues, just as a product team controls that product's issues... I can't interpolate their language for them, same as before.]
Posted by: tcs at May 1, 2006 09:19 AM
Though Canton didn't present the most eloquent argument, I generally agree with his sentiment. There should at least have been an internal dialogue between Adobe legal and the Flash Community liasons before going heavy-handed on someone who has done nothing but do free work for Adobe. [jd sez: I think that was the course, until it went public.]
I understand the need to protect trademarks, though I think there is precedent to make this a debatable case (see Apple's attempts in the 90s to stop companies from using "Mac" in their name/products). Whatever the case, this isn't as much about the legal wrangling as it is about how Adobe's first noteable step towards the Flash community was to bring the legal hammer down. [jd sez: I know of no "hammer", it was a person-to-person request "Hey, if we'll be publishing this on the Adobe site, we need to resolve this naming problem first."] It doesn't provide a good tone for future conversation with the community. It seems that the Adobe part of the corporation has some things to learn from the Macromedia side in terms of fostering goodwill and a dialogue with their customer base.
Posted by: brett walker at May 1, 2006 11:41 AM