Hello,
sorry for the delay. You probably got the bad news from other sources already. But I was very busy with this legal trouble in the last days. But now the English press release is ready, too. Just a few minutes ago I have got a phone call from the owner of another German site, which has withdrawn his domain, because he got a request to do so from the lawyers of Asterix and Obelix. But for me I try to get ready for the last instance in court. In my opinion the legal threads for Open Source projects are increasing. And I hope this will end someday. There are two remedies of which I think already:
- publicity, I dare to say that slashdotting this case would not only help me but others, too ;-) - creating a fund and/or an insurance to help other projects under siege
Werner
MobiliX - Mobile UniX Site Lost Trademark Case in Second Instance
The written verdict of the appelation court was released now. Contrary to the decision of the first court it states that Obelix and MobiliX are "very similar". Therefore it will be likely that people take one for the other. It doesn't matter that the suffix "ix" is used very often to name computer related products, because the names have to be sufficient apart. Werner Heuser owner of MobiliX (http://mobilix.org) was charged to withdraw his trademark and the domain name. He also has to pay a compensation fee. His lawyers Jaschinski, Biere and Brexl (http://www.jbb.de) are currently checking whether an appelation to the highest German court Bundesgerichtshof is possible. Until this decision the plaintiff will not make use of the verdict.
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. 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 a information about other projects under siege and the written statements of the lawyers JBB, is available online (http://mobilix.org/mobilix_asterix.html).