Obelix./.MobiliX: Detailed Argumentation to the Highest German Civil Court

[Werner Heuser]

Obelix./.MobiliX: new details about the appeal to the highest German civil court

On May 27th 2003 Prof. Dr. Achim Kraemer has send a detailed request to
permit an appeal to the highest German civil court the
Bundesgerichtshof - BGH.

The new German civil law allows only a very few cases for an appeal to
the BGH. There must for example general public interests strongly be
concerned. In his long and detailed argumentation Prof. Dr. Kraemer
writes: "The commercial usage of domain names leads already at the time
of their registration to preventive reactions by holders of older
trademarks, which claim their trademarks as violated. Particular risks
exist for so-called word-trademarks, which contain parts of the common
language, if they are combined with suffixes or prefixes used in certain
groups. If trademarks are protected to much excessive, as the appeal
court has done in our opinion, some very famous but fancy names may occupy
a wide range of the language and it well become impossible for others to
create new word-trademarks." A decision of the BGH to permit the appeal is
expected at the end of 2003. A final verdict will probably not be
available until 2005.

In autumn 2001 Les Edition Albert René, the owner of the trademark Obelix
has charged Werner Heuser. He is the owner of the wellknown open source
project MobiliX ( now TuxMobil http://tuxmobil.org ) . This project provides a
plenty of information about UniX operating systems like Linux, BSD and
Solaris on mobile computers.  Therefore he has choosen a name, which
expresses this by a combination of the words "Mobile" and "iX".  According
to the plaintiff he has choosen a word very similar to their trademark
Obelix, because he wants to take advantage of their famous name.

A detailed documentation of the case, containing information
about other projects under siege and the written statements of the
lawyers JBB http://jbb.de , is available online
http://tuxmobil.org/mobilix_asterix.html

At the 4th Libre Software Meeting Metz (France) July 2003  Werner Heuser
will give a talk about the case
http://www.libresoftwaremeeting.org

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