On Sun, Sep 16, 2007 at 07:52:36AM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
> That's sort of amusing.  My understanding of trademark law is that one
> can't trademark a single word.  But note that Panic appear to claim
> protection for "CODA", not "Coda."

Given that there is

http://www.linuxmark.org/

protecting Linux(R)

it is possible to trademark one word. AFAIK the trademark protection prevents
usage of similar spellings which may cause confusion, not only
lowercase/uppercase variants which apparently can be confusing.

> Still, I'd suggest to Satya that he
> ask CMU legal to file some sort of notice with the PTO attesting to the
> longstanding prior use of the word by Coda, simply to avoid grief should
> there be some 'coda has to change its name because of CODA' in the
> future.

It would be wise, especially given that usage of /coda is as fundamental
as http: in urls, we depend on the name more than just for marketing.

Even given that nobody could disallow us to use "coda" for the file system,
usage of the word for other software is a hinder for Coda awareness in general.
Shouldn't CMU register the trademark to prevent such misuse?

Regards,
Rune