[pLog-general] Fwd: Trademark question

[Oscar Renalias]

sorry I forgot to Cc the list. This is the message that I sent to the EFF.

Amazon clearly wants to help but I would still like to know an opinion
from somebody like the EFF who probably have more experience than any
of us regarding this topic. Let's hope they get back to me soon.

Oscar

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Oscar Renalias <phunkphorce at gmail.com>
Date: Apr 8, 2005 9:58 AM
Subject: Trademark question
To: information at eff.org


Hello,

my name is Oscar Renalias and I am the leader and founder of the pLog
[1] project, a GPLed open-source blogging platform for user
communities. PLog stands for "PHP blog".

If this not the right mailbox for this kind of inquiries, please let
me know the right one.

I am writing to you because we were recently contacted by Jeff Barr
from Amazon.com regarding the name "plog". Amazon has a trademark in
the USPTO about it [2] since January 2003, covering something that
they call "personal logs" [3] and they would like us to stop using
their trademark.

Our project was registered in sourceforget.net in June 2003 [4], but
our popularity has grown quite much recently after releasing our
latest major release so that probably got Amazon's attention.

I had a phone conversion with Jeff yesterday and he made it clear that
Amazon wants to handle this in a nice and easy way and that they will
help us in anything they can, even with money if needed (domain
transfer, etc) as long as we agree to change our project name.
However, it's taken us almost 2 years of very hard to become
recognized by this name and letting it go know doesn't sound like a
very good idea. I have a couple of questions about this, so we were
wondering if you could help us:

- Do US trademarks apply everywhere in the world? I am a Spanish
citizen and most of the members of the team are either EU citizens
(Germany, Spain, etc), Chinese or Taiwanese. We do have some active
American members, though.

- Have you had any case like this before?

I am still waiting for Amazon's proposal but in the meantime I would
like to hear your advice. As I said, it all looked like Amazon wants
to be helpful but we would still like to know where we legally stand
in this case.

We would be glad to provide more background information if needed.

Best regards,

Oscar Renalias
oscar at renalias.net / oscar at plogworld.net

[1]: http://www.plogworld.net
[2]: http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=6pi97.2.1
[3]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/13023961/102-2039459-6744906
[4]: http://sourceforge.net/projects/plog