[Wikipedia-l] larousse.wikipedia.org?

Wed May 21 13:56:59 UTC 2003

"Oliver Pereira" wrote on  Wednesday, May 21, 2003 5:00 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] larousse.wikipedia.org?

>
> My copy of the "New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Animal Life" is an
> English-language encyclopaedia, although it is based on a French work. I'm
> not making any legal point at all, but I must admit that Wikipedia's use
> of the name did strike me as odd. A bit like Microsoft calling one of its
> servers "macintosh", and then saying, "Yeah, but we named after an
> esteemed computer scientist, not the rival brand of computers..."
>
> Oliver

I think that the analogy with Macintosh may be a bit wrong. If someone
gets linked to Wikipedia by putting the word larousse into a brower,
search engine, etc., in light of  Larousse publishing English encyclopedias
I think that they might have a trademark infringement issue, the word, in
English is considered fanciful.  It is not an actual English word and it
was not MrLarousse or Drlarousse it is the exact infringing word. And
wasn't Larousse the man the founder of Larousse the company? This is
the whole point of a trademark, you can't call Spanish sparkling wine
champagne as champagne is a trademark identified with the production
of sparking wine in a particular French region.

Since it links to an encyclopedia there is not an issue of secondary
meaning.
This is the protection that Larousse was seeking when it applied for
a trademark and got it from the US government.

I am just saying here that one might have a hard time convincing a federal
judge, in light of the use of Larousse as a trademark name and being used
for English encyclopedias that its trademark was not infringed.  Of course
the infringement may be insignificant, but that is not the issue, is it?

Alex756

>
> +-------------------------------------------+
> | Oliver Pereira                            |
> | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
> | University of Southampton                 |
> | omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
> +-------------------------------------------+
>
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