[Jon Westfall]

Originally Posted by whydidnt

Jon, I hate to argue with a new MVP, but....

In this case I do think you are definitely being weird...

Argue away, and I am probably weird just for the record

Trademark isn't about making sure others don't use your logo, colors, etc. It's to make sure other's don't use those to confuse a consumer into buying one product thinking it's another.

I don't think the issue was 'buying' per sey, but people confusing engadget mobile for an officially representative arm of T-Mobile, which would confuse a consumer.

In this case nobody, including an idiot in a hurry

Have you seen some of the idiots in a hurry on the net?

, would go to the engadet Mobile site an think that they could buy a phone or service from T-Mobile. If engadget Mobile was selling mobile phone service you would have a better argument, though the names are sufficiently different enough that even that would be a difficult one for me to swallow.

Trademark means I can't make a cola product, put it in a red can that says "Coke Cola", instead of "Coca Cola" and then sell it to people who think they are getting the real thing. The problem is that so many companies, such as T-Mobile, in this case, either don't care what the law is, or want to use the law to try and bully out true competition that many of us have become immune to the true purpose of trademark law. In this case engadget has handled this appropriately by mocking T-mobile and their ignorance of trademark law. Please don't further confuse this sort of issue by implying T-Mobile is correct in this in ANY sort of way - they don't own the world wide rights to the word mobile in magenta.

I agree with your point about the unsavory use of trademark law by some big corporations, however in this case they may have an extremely small leg to stand on. Consider this example:

Very dumb t-mobile user heads over to engadget mobile one day by accident and notices a story especially critical of T-Mobile, suggesting that T-Mobile customers receive some sort of compensation for a T-mo screw up (Give it time, this will happen...) Very Dumb then calls T-Mobile and asks for his compensation, claiming that he went to "the mobile news website you guys run".

Now this is a pretty far-fetched story, which is why I said it was an extremely small leg. However this may be a valid argument, which is why I posed the issue in the first place.

I think your post answered it's own question when you said "..I don't think anyone is confused by the difference." If that's the case then clearly there is no trademark violation.

I never answer my own questions, Do I? Of course not!

Jon.