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

/* * Please update your BOOKMARKS and help by changing all the LINKS * * FROM mobilix.org TO tuxmobil.org */