I’m not sure how I feel about this. My knee-jerk reaction is, that money-grubbing hypocritical capitalist bastard - how could he exploit peoples’ hard work this way?
The calmer, more rational side of me believes his explanation - that he’s just trying to prevent others from exploiting the MAME name and making a profit from bootleg ROMs.
I really can’t decide whether his motives are sincere or not.
He’s trying to trademark the MAME name and logo. The name at least has been around 8 years, and was invented by someone else, along with all the IP that goes with it. He claims it’s to prevent others from unethically or illegally profitting from the “brand”.
Fuck it. Give him everything he asks for. It would be worth the free entertainment of seeing him try to enforce it against the entire netizens across the world.
This has to be one of the lamest attempts of gaining recognition I’ve ever seen. I hope he has a really good firewall.
Whe I use the word MAME, it refers to a crappy movie musical starring Lucille Ball and Bea Arthur. And a presumably non-crappy Broadway musical that it was based on.
I knew your reference, this, however, is what’s up for grabs. Though, how someone with a .net domain for it wouldn’t have a legit argument is beyond my understanding of copyright law.
MAME is Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. It’s a computer program that basically pretends to be arcade game hardware so that a user can play exact copies of old arcade games on his modern computer without having to drag a giant arcade machine into his apartment. MAME has also been ported to the Xbox and Dreamcast (and probably others), allowing you to play old arcade games on your modern console.
On Preview: Cab is short for cabinet, the large housing that arcade games and their monitors are placed in. A vendor sells something that looks like a normal single arcade game, but is actually a computer running MAME, enabling it to play multiple games from the same cabinet.
This guy is angry because his company legally licensed a few dozen of these old games and sells them in arcade cabinets. Other vendors don’t bother with the licensing, so their ads read “Play 4,000 games on one machine!,” while his read “Play a couple dozen games on one machine,” since that was all he could license.
Why he feels that trademarking something that doesn’t belong to him (MAME is open source software) will be effective in ridding the marketplace of less scrupulous dealers is unclear.
See Auntie Mame (1958) staring Rosalind Russell and try to forget that 1975 Lucille Ball version, when she was way too old to play Mame Dennis. Although Bea Arthur was a great Vera Charles, the rest of the movie stunk on ice. The movies as well as the 1966 Broadway play were based on the 1955 novel Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis.
Thank you neutron star for that lucid explanation. I clicked on the link in the OP but it was like reading something badly translated from a foreign language.
The doctrine of prior art doesn’t apply to trademarks like it does to patents, but you can’t trademark a name that is likely to make someone confuse you with someone else. Apple Computers was judged to be sufficiently distant from Apple Records that it could keep the name as long as it kept out of the music publishing business (hence the current lawsuit between the two Apples).
The case under review in this thread is the exact antithesis of that. There is no distance from UltraCade’s trademark and the long-established usage, and there is no way to avoid confusion. UltraCade’s excuse is prima facie absurd: If the MAME development group doesn’t want people abusing the MAME name, it’s up to them to do something about it, not some nosy and interested third party. UltraCade’s complaints re other cabinet sellers are neither here nor there; they do not even make an effective smokescreen.
In short, I hope this doesn’t make it to trial, but if it does there’s no reasonable way UltraCade can win.
quote]Then much of the computing industry is SOL.
[/quote]
I could be wrong, but IIRC IBM has International Business Machine trademarked, not IBM itself. There are a lot of other places with the initials IBM and I believe they can used it, although there might be a copyright infringement sui if they started selling copmputers with a suspiciously-similar IBM logo slapped on the side.
Thinking of IBM TM’ing the acronym, could they try to force others to not use the letters for business. I’m reminded of The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) forcing, somehow, World Wrestling Federation (WWF) to change the World Wide Entertainment (WWE) or something like that.
Are the two concepts related, or was that an entirely different deal happening there?
