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Comment by ScottBurson | Hacker News Reader

IANAL, but I think the PSF's trademark is on very shaky ground.

CMU Common Lisp has had an innovative, high-performance compiler called Python since before van Rossum invented the scripting language. A Common Lisp compiler and a programming language are, seems to me, very much in the same market space; I do not think the PSF could successfully argue in court that they do not overlap -- certainly not at the same time they were arguing that a cloud service does overlap a scripting language.

I'm sure van Rossum was unaware of CMUCL's Python when he named his language. But that doesn't matter in trademark law; you don't get to claim a trademark someone else is already using just because you didn't know about them.

And I believe that using a mark that was already in use gives you a very weak claim, if any, to your trademark.

CMUCL is, by the way, still in use.

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Irrelevant. If you don't defend a "Trademark", any rights you have to it go away. You're required to DEFEND your Trademark to keep ownership -- and even if you have a common-law Trademark (which is what you're claiming CMUCL has on "Python"), if you allow someone else to register a Trademark at the federal level and fail to oppose the registration, you can lose your rights that way.

IANAL, but I've read a lot about Trademark law, and I've talked to more than one IP attorney about it. For reference, see for example [1] and [2]. It's not like patent law where prior art can invalidate a bad patent. It's defend-it-or-lose-it.

[1] http://www.blackweb20.com/2009/11/25/the-consequences-of-not...

[2] http://www.adlilaw.com/importance-of-monitoring-your-tradema...

You're missing my point. I'm not suggesting at all that the CMUCL developers would want to stop the PSF from using the name Python. That would be the situation that your argument is relevant to.

No, I'm making quite a different point, about the ability of the PSF to stop anyone else from using the name. In order to be able to assert trademark rights against someone else, you have to have a valid trademark to begin with. If your use of the mark was never exclusive to begin with, I don't see how you can claim to have an exclusive right to it now.

Perhaps in the US, since the PSF has registered the mark and the CMUCL people didn't contest it (in time), the PSF now has an exclusive right to it. Although here another point comes into play: I've never heard of the PSF attempting to prevent CMUCL from using the name. Supposing they haven't, a case can now be made that the PSF has failed to defend it and therefore has lost their exclusive right to it. So I think that can cut both ways. CMUCL has no exclusive right to the name -- I seriously doubt they care -- but if some third party started to use it, I wonder if the PSF could prevail over the latter in court.

But all that aside, this case is in the EU, where as far as I understand, the PSF has no registered trademark anyway. I think POBox Hosting could make a very strong case that, since CMUCL's Python has certainly been used in the EU, the PSF has no exclusive right to the name there.

I'm pretty sure they would be fine with stopping anyone from having an exclusive trademark, as a second prize. Because you know, the company in the EU is trying for an exclusive trademark. So, maybe they loose the best option, but win when they don't have to rename everything because it violates someone's exclusive mark?

See my reply to Volpe below.

Wow you are a total shill. Obviously PSF is acting hostilely as you are insinuating, because they wanted to minimize confusion, or maybe they just wanted to minimize confusion.

I am not a shill. I am a longtime user of CMUCL and its now-more-popular fork, SBCL. The name collision has been an annoyance for years -- I always have to qualify which Python I'm talking about. This hardly minimizes confusion.

But that's fine right. As long as no one else gets the trademark, then the PSF is happy. Or do I have it wrong?

From the article:

But when at the start of 2012 the PSF heard that POBox intended to launch a product called "Python Cloud" they were alarmed, since Python is widely used in this area. The new product posed a real risk of confusing the public, so the PSF wrote to POBox in January 2012 asking them not to do this and pointing out the PSF registered US trademark.

POBox retaliated by filing the trademark registration application, but the PSF fired the first shot in this battle, trying to keep POBox from using the name.

If the PSF's attempt to save someone the costs and time of a filing challengeable trademark application counts as "firing the first shot", I'd hate to see a "pre-emptive strike."

So nobody gets the trademark and we carry on. The problem is a land-grab by a private company wishing to sew up the word 'python' as it relates to computers and software all across the EU.

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