IANAL, but legal protection for trademarks extends to any usage wherein it would create sufficient consumer confusion.
Great example: Apple v. Apple. The computer company agreed to not enter the music industry. To the extent of which they got sued when they added a sound card and multimedia features to their computers. They settled for a boatload of money rather than let a judge decide that they couldn't add any sound/media features.
The bigger issue is that the GNOME foundation lawyers are attempting to deal with these competing registrations individually, rather than as a class, and trying to convince a judge that Groupon is acting in bad faith and attempting to use the legal system to force them to abandon the trademark in the face of excessive legal fees.
Selling out could be worth it given the right amount of money. Open source projects have changed their names in the past. And a settlement that could fund developers would be a nice benefit for GNOME.
> IANAL, but legal protection for trademarks extends to any usage wherein it would create sufficient consumer confusion.
Let's be honest though: walk up to any Joe on the street and ask them what GNOME is. They're not going to recognize it as a *nix desktop environment or a retail POS system.
The standard is not "ask any joe on the street" but "Will the create confusing among the target consumer"
I say yes, People making purchasing choices over a companies IT infrastructure will know what the Gnome Foundation is, that they create software of high quality, and I can see the case for Confusion. ie
IT Manager: WOW Gnome is now making a great looking POS System.
So the fact that "Avg joe" does not know what or Who Gnome is does not matter in the least bit
"Any joe on the street" is not the consumer in this case. People purchasing retail POS systems would know what it is. They are the consumer. They could easily be fooled into thinking that Groupon's product is affiliated with the well known Gnome software when it clearly isn't.
Great example: Apple v. Apple. The computer company agreed to not enter the music industry. To the extent of which they got sued when they added a sound card and multimedia features to their computers. They settled for a boatload of money rather than let a judge decide that they couldn't add any sound/media features.
The bigger issue is that the GNOME foundation lawyers are attempting to deal with these competing registrations individually, rather than as a class, and trying to convince a judge that Groupon is acting in bad faith and attempting to use the legal system to force them to abandon the trademark in the face of excessive legal fees.