Judge Denies TigerDirect's Request for Injunction 378
wallykeyster writes "As predicted in previous discussions the judge has ruled against TigerDirect's request for injunction to prevent Apple from using 'Tiger' in their advertising." I heard that both people who still held respect for TigerDirect no longer do.
Re:Even the judiciary loves Apple. (Score:3, Informative)
"It is technically possible for a manufacturer to install any number of operating systems on a computer. The user then has to choose which operating system to use during the boot process (after switching on the machine). However, Microsoft OEMs are only allowed to install Windows. No machines with both Windows and, for example, the free (!) operating system Linux, can legally be sold by OEMs."
Doesn't sound especially fair to anyone but Microsoft, that. Remember who the convicted monopolist is?
Re:Even the judiciary loves Apple. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is dumb. (Score:1, Informative)
What brand of kleenex do you buy?
Re:This is not personal. They have to protect it. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is dumb. (Score:5, Informative)
A company that has an already common word as part of their company name is upset because another company uses the same already common word as part of the name of one of their products. Oh God, the world is coming to an end! Between Tiger Direct, OS 10.4 Tiger, the approximately 6 bazillion sports teams named the Tigers, a dominate golfer named Tiger, oh and some stupid animal using the name too...I don't think I can function anymore, my brain is overloaded!
Besides. Apple announced their product as Tiger a long time ago. Then TigerDirect decides to make a big deal of it right before it's about to ship? The timing seems awfully suspect to me. Must be because I'm an Apple simpleton.
Re:TigerDirect in the Wrong? (Score:2, Informative)
However you can get a trademark on a image mark, which could include a common word, but it will also be accompanied by the font used, other graphic elements and the colors used.
Re:TigerDirect in the Wrong? (Score:2, Informative)
Try starting at OS I, then OS II... eventually OS IX then OS X. I distinctly remember something in US IP history that says you can't protect a number. X is just another number - I was going to say "just not in the common numerical system, then I realised that one place that system is commonly used is legal documents. Long story short, go ahead, market an Operating System X - just make sure you lead up to it appropriately.
Re:Beware TigerDirect (Score:4, Informative)
You will never be asked your SS number, or any part of your SS number if you are not applying to purchase on credit from them.
Re:Marketing budget (Score:4, Informative)
And while gcc and mach are significant, they are proportionally very small parts of OS X, and they could be replaced by something else. There are certainly other compilers out there than gcc - betters ones too - and there are certainly other kernels too. I mean, Apple could have potentially licensed the Solaris or BeOS kernels, maybe QNX, or whatever else. Hell, perhaps even WinCE or something. There *ARE* options. Some are better than others, of course. But to say that there would be no Apple without FOSS, and especially to suggest that 10.4 is largely developed by the open source community, well, that's just bull.
Re:This is not personal. They have to protect it. (Score:3, Informative)
From TFA "... evidence of over 200 federal registrations of marks containing the term "Tiger" -- including 24 companies, other than TigerDirect, which employ Tiger marks to promote computer products and services."
So will these 200 companies lose their marks because they didn't challenge the 201st?
It has to be a similar product with a similar mark, the degrees of similarity being the things a judge decides on. In this case, not very, just the word "Tiger" isn't enough.
Re:This is dumb. (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, English is acquiring new words at a fast pace, probably thousands per year. Even the staid Oxford Dictionary [askoxford.com] records many new words in each edition.
Re:Marketing budget (Score:1, Informative)
I think Be wanted too much money for their OS and Apple therefore decided to go with something else.
Re:This is not personal. They have to protect it. (Score:2, Informative)
You seriously can't see? (Score:1, Informative)
Microsoft was pressuring *other companies* to sell with their OS installed.
If there weren't a difference, every device sold would have to have a choice of OS... VCRs, Palms, Tivos.... That's ridiculous.
Microsoft sells an OS and does not manufacture PCs. If it uses its OS monopoly to restrict trade by locking up other markets, it's in trouble.
This is what people tend to fail to understand about antitrust law. It isn't that having a monopoly is a moral sin. It's that using a monopoly so you get *all* of a restricted market instead of *some* of a freer market is bad for everyone but the monopolist. It's like racketeering.
Apple's own product line is not a market. Therefore they can do whatever they want with it. Only when they tell someone else what product line to have will they have trouble, and then only under very specific circumstances.
Re:This is not personal. They have to protect it. (Score:4, Informative)
You're citing John Nugent? John Fucking Nugent? Delusional white-supremacist holocaust-revisionist John Fucking Nugent? America belongs to the whites because europeans were here before the indians John Fucking Nugent?
...", did you ever consider books?
Oh, and this is really your lucky day. You really hit the jackpot. One side of my family was exterminated in concentration camps, and you're citing a delusional holocaust-hoaxist.
For your sake I really hope you had no idea that you were reading and citing that sort of psycho. That libertyforum.org seems to be crawling with an appalling number of borderline neo-nazis. Not everyone there of course, but a very very ugly subgroup.
On the bright side I did get a chuckle out your link of when he explained that all of the UFO sightings since World War II were due to the magical futuristic stolen German inventions we never found out about. Not merely a holocaust denier, but a UFO conspiracy theorist to boot. That's just icing on the psycho-cake.
Oh and not to nitpick, but you should attend your English classes. I before E except after C would teach you that it's 'piece' not 'peice'.
Hmmm, lets review the "ei" words from my post. There was 'their' 'peice' and 'neither'. Ok, I botched 'peice'. However if your "English class" is the worthless I before E except after C you're going to be misspelling 'their' and 'neither'. I before E except after C except when pronounced as "A" and in neighbor and weigh, except science and species, except in pluralized 'cy' such as frequencies and vacancies, except in neither and either and eight and foreign and dreidel, and most of all in my daily caffeine. And on and on. But enough with the grammar Nazism, as if we didn't have enough Nazism with John Nugent already.
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When you said, "Things like copyrights and patents
Well I dunno... "things like copyrights"... books... "things like copyrights"... books...
Hmmm. There might just be a connection there.
You believe in physical property rights but not intellectual property rights?
There are property rights.
There are copyrights.
There are patents.
There are trademarks.
Good and useful things. Only one of them is property rights.
The term "intellectual property" is a misnomer, and it is an extremely harmful misnomer. Copyrights are different than property rights and they are SUPPOSED to be different than property rights because information is different than property. When someone starts thinking or talking "intellectual property" they almost inevitably misunderstand what the law actually says, and they almost inevitable try to "fix" the law to become what they *thought* it was supposed to say.
Do you think that books also should not be copyrighted because they are just made up of words in different order?
As I said, copyrights can be a good and useful thing. However it is important to understand what the law actually says and what the law is actually supposed to be and what it is supposed to do.
To some people the following is going to sound like an attack on copyright. It's not. It is a defense of good old traditional copyright. It is merely an attack on a "backwards" view of copyright.
The Constitution grants congress the power to promote progress if they choose to do so. If congress did not choose to exercise this power then there would be no copyrights at all. The initial state is that the public has all rights to do whatever they please with information. To the extent information itself is "property" it is fundamentally public property.
If congress does choose to promote progress, the constitution grants a means of doing so. Congress may secure certain limited rights from the public and temporarily grant them exclusively to the author or inventor. A government granted limited monopoly. Th
Re:This is not personal. They have to protect it. (Score:3, Informative)
Ironically enough, a percentage of German gold was actually stolen from displaced/killed Jews and other countries that Germany had conquered. Tons of that gold made it back to New York where it was re-pressed with the Federal Seal, thereby making it US money.
This story is highly unlikely. There were two international conferences, one in 1997 and one in 1998, on the disposition of Nazi gold. As this CNN report [cnn.com] on the first conference shows, the U.S.'s objective was always to return the gold to its rightful owners:
Your story is even more unlikely if one knows the difference between monetary and non-monetary gold. Monetary gold is gold bars of 99.9% pure gold that are used by central banks. Non-monetary gold is jewelry and ornamental gold. For non-monetary gold, the type that would be stolen from individuals, to be "re-pressed with the Federal Seal", as you put it, it would not only have to be melted down but also refined to the level of purity required by monetary gold. There's no evidence in the report of the international commission that the U.S. ever employed this process.
The Nazis certainly did convert non-monetary gold into gold bars but once they did, there would be no way to distinguish it from gold that was looted from national treasuries.
In addition, while gold may increase in value it does not accumulate interest. If the U.S. did return gold to anyone it would return the exact number of ounces they were owned. It would not "pay them back, with interest" because the gold did not earn any interest.
Reading the final report [usembassy-israel.org.il] of the international commission shows that no advocacy group forced the U.S. to return the gold in its possession. The complaint [jewishsf.com] of the World Jewish Congress was that the gold belonging to Holocaust victims was returned to European countries after the war, not that it was held by the U.S. treasury.
In addition, the report of this commission also notes:
The objective of impeding German's "capacity to wage a future war" may also bear on you allegation that the U.S. seized German patents.