On Tue, 20 May 2003, Alex T. wrote:
The point is not all use of a trademark is
infringement of that mark, I am
not offering Wikipedia my legal opinion (though I do admit to being
a lawyer, I hope that doesn't make anyone nervous) but just stating
what to me seems pretty obvious, it is the French word that Larousse
is trying to protect as a mark for its French encyclopedias, not for all
uses of the word. Unlike copyright trademarks must be used to be
protected, and while there is an argument that the word larousse is
a registered trademark referring to encyclopedias, it is also true that
they only use it in reference to French encyclopedias
My copy of the "New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Animal Life" is an
English-language encyclopaedia, although it is based on a French work. I'm
not making any legal point at all, but I must admit that Wikipedia's use
of the name did strike me as odd. A bit like Microsoft calling one of its
servers "macintosh", and then saying, "Yeah, but we named after an
esteemed computer scientist, not the rival brand of computers..."
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton |
| omp199(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk |
+-------------------------------------------+