[WEB4LIB] RE: The word "listserv" copyrighted?

[Bosman, Don]

Its a given that L-Soft claims copyright and says so at their web site. 
Anyone may do the paperwork to register a trademark. Unless they take the steps to defend that trademark it may be lost to them. I guess it depends on how one would define vigorously and how one would define may. The exact definition of the word sex has had an interesting fairly recent past. 

Paramount vigorously defends their copyright.
Until restrained by public out cry, Warner Bros. vigorously defends their copyright.
L-Soft ??? 

If you put up anything on your website that Paramount has copyright to, such as Star Trek materials, you will receive a warning from Paramount within hours or days of it hitting a search engine. 
Put up a site dealing with Harry Potter and you will receive warning from Warner Bros. very quickly.
There are web sites and many press articles dealing with how vigorously Paramount and Warner Bros. defend their copyright.

A casual search on the word "listserv" shows a large number of usages of that word that do not make any reference to trademark. Given the ease of finding these occurrences I question, but will not challenge, L-Soft in claiming the word is still "theirs". 

Anyone want to create and market a new list server software named listserve? 8-)

I have a slight personal interest in this type of issue in that I lost a nice business to Chinese manufacturers. They took my designs and are currently selling tens of thousands of copies every year and there isn't a damn thing I can do about it due to the vagarities of copyright law. Trademark law is a bit better defined, but like many other issues in life money decides who wins, not necessarily what is right.

Anyway, haven't we all got better things to do on the day before we all stay at work for system upgrades?




-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Lester [mailto:dan at riverofdata.com]
Sent: Friday, May 24, 2002 4:54 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] RE: The word "listserv" copyrighted?



Friday, May 24, 2002, 2:32:52 PM, you wrote:

BD> Even if listserv had been a registered trademark, it has
BD> not been vigorously protected so it would be in the public
BD> domain. A quick search on any search engine would turn up
BD> more evidence then necessary to defend your argument.

Actually, as others have also confirmed, it IS a registered trademark,
and they DO vigorously pursue enforcement of their trademark.  They
obviously can't go after every person who posts to a list, but they do
when it is in print, a machine name not running their software, and so
forth.  I'm copying this to them, and perhaps they'll respond with
more info.

dan

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