At 06:44 PM 8/22/99 +0200, Andrzej Bialecki wrote:
>On Sun, 22 Aug 1999, Kevin Day wrote:
>
>[trademark violation warning]
>
>Ok, maybe you have a point - I dont know, I'm not a lawyer. But with this
>line of reasoning they could claim that anything using falling letters
>effect on your screen partly violates they trademarked special effect,
>which is silly.
>
>What can we do, then? Why don't we ask them politely if it's ok?
>
>Andrzej Bialecki
While I can't speak for how Warner Brothers' lawyers are, as a general
rule.. "It's much easier to say No, than it is to say Yes, and regret it
later." If you ask, you'll probably get a No.
It's not that you made a falling letter effect, it's that you made a
falling letter effect to copy the effect in the movie, and it does look
very much like what's in the movie. That could be called willful
infringement. While I doubt they'd stop a fan from making something like
this, (I don't know this for a fact though, see what Paramount did with
Trek sites before, or Mattel with Barbie) they may be more led to taking
action against a product being sold that contains it. (FreeBSD being sold
by Walnut Creek and others).
If this is distributed as a fan based thing, the worst they'd likely do is
say "Take it down.". If this is on thousands of FreeBSD cd's, it could
become a financial problem if they want to take it far enough.
This is just my opinion though, and not to be used as legal advice for
anyone. I just don't want FreeBSD to become a ball of intellectual property
infringements. :)
Kevin
To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
