[TUHS] Re: Microware's OS-9 (was: Clever code)

[John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>]

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On Wed, Dec 14, 2022 at 10:15 AM G. Branden Robinson <
g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:


Microware, having apparently so carefully followed the letter of
> trademark law with respect to AT&T Unix, sued Apple for peddling "OS/9"
> in the operating system market, and promptly got their asses handed to
> them by the federal district court, which dutifully honored the foremost
> principle of law: big people get to stomp smaller people as often, and
> as hard, as they would like.[2]
>


To be fair, the judge decided that there wasn't a whole lot of risk of
consumer confusion between a consumer OS that ran only on Apple Macintoshes
and an OEM OS that did not.  The only actual victims were Mac people who
stumbled into comp.os.os9 and got seriously confused.

In any case, Microsoft v. Lindows pretty much established that sometimes
the little guy wins, even in trademark cases.  Microsoft claimed that
Lindows was infringing their trademark for Windows (it was a Linux distro
that came with Wine and some glue) and lost the case on prior-use grounds
(both Xerox and Apple).  So rather than risking all on a retrial and maybe
losing the Windows trademark altogether, they settled for US$20M and
Lindows changed its corporate and distro names to Linspire.

That said, "Windows" is a descriptive trademark, and those are always shaky
legally.

> Cisco rolled over
> and took some undisclosed amount of money,
>

Money undoubtedly flowed from Apple Computers to Apple Records when the
first company started selling music, too.  This sort of thing is routine.
While I was working at Chase Bank, they paid a small fortune to Chase
Research for the rights to "chase.com".

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