crack attack trademark issues / ok for Fe?

[Hans de Goede]

Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Tue, 01 Aug 2006 23:08:33 +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> I was wondering why the game crack-attack was in that other repo instead
>> of in FE. 
> 
> With more searching it might be possible to find more references to prior
> discussion. This has come up before and also before April 2005.
> 
>  So I asked the other repo, I got a reply pointing to this post:
>> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-extras-list/2005-April/msg00727.html
> 
> This doesn't contain any details.
>  
>> Which talks about the Tetris trademark. I however do not see how thats
>> an issue as the name crack attack does not seem to use the word Tetris.
> 
> Maybe it does no longer. The game web page still does.
> 
> Wikipedia gives a brief summary of all the legal rumblings around clones
> of Tetris, which didn't use the same name. Enough reason to be concerned
> unless you're a lawyer.
> 

I think (IANAL) that the owners of the Tetris Trademark have no legal
standing against Crack Attack, because it only has similar game
mechanics and the name and graphics are different.

Mere mentioning of the name Tetris Attack, in the context of pointing
out that Crack-attack has similar game play is not a legal problem. If
that is a legal problem, then we wave a lot, really a lot of packages
with this problem. Dia claims to be similar to visio, openoffice claims
to be similar to and compatible with microsoft word / excell. gnumeric
claims to have reached 100% of excel's functionality, etc.

And even closer to this case we have freeciv, which even has part of the
name the same and lincity, which both are in FE.

The *mere* fact that in this case the owner of the product mentioned in
comparison is a bit trigger happy with sueing shouldn't mean that we
thus don't ship it. That is a *very* bad precedent to set, that is
giving in to blackmail, which is asking for a lot more blackmail!

Now I could live with stripping the mention of Tetris from the version
we ship, but not shipping because the original homepage then still
mentions it is ridiculous. The owners of Tetris already have very little
legal standing in this case, especially against us since we are merely
distributing and they have left upstream alone for years. Going after
us, with as argument that we link to a homepage which mentions their
trademark (in what is probably a fair use way) is a very long shot, and
will most likely get thrown out of court pretty fast (IANAL).


So, does submitting a version with any mention of Tetris removed sound
ok? If not can someone please ask RH legals department for advice on this?

Regards,

Hans