Friday, July 27, 2012

Hopeless

"Intel trademarked all the USB technology a long time ago."
-Vice President of a certain company

Really sir? Was that after they patented all their logos?

5 comments:

Cincinnatus said...

Aaarrgggh.

Then they copyrighted their name.

Chaon said...

You know, I've always been pretty modest about my grasp of I.P. law. I didn't go to law school, didn't pass the bar. I Googled a lot, spent a lot of time at Crouch's Blog 'O Patenty Stuff linked over there on the right, and asked a lot of questions of the actual I.P. attorneys I was working with. I never thought to claim any kind of expertise.

Until I worked at this company. I swear to God, in the land of the blind, the colorblind myopic guy is like a sage of some sort. Well, if he can just get everyone else to shut the fuck up for a minute...

Cincinnatus said...

Yep. But Karl, I see a lot of lawyers who know less than you about the various forms of IP and how they interrelate. I got a cease and desist letter from an attorney regarding a trademark matter - my client blatantly copied a logo used by a company in another state - that couldn't get trademark, copyright or patent straight.

Anonymous said...

The saddest thing is not when you realize you could do other people's jobs better than they could, but that the HR department wouldn't even look at your resume if you had applied for the position.

Chaon said...

It's all good now. VP in question was insisting that our product packaging say "WiFi", thereby (in his view) circumventing the "Wi-Fi" (certification) trademark owned by the Wi-Fi Alliance. My arguments that it doesn't work that way were met by the above nonsense (though to be fair, he might not know the English words 'likelihood' and 'confusion'). So I stormed over to Legal and told them what was going on. They assured me that as long as I was going to be the one to call out the VP's misconceptions, they'd have my back. Nobody wants to have to explain to an influential senior manager that he is a bonehead. Except me, of course.