Quote: The term 'EV Nova' in and of itself is a trademark of Ambrosia. Using that term, (whether explicit or implied), on a third party product would first require the written approval of Ambrosia.
No, I'm afraid this is incorrect.
For a full discussion, see (url="http://"http://www.intellectual-property.gov.uk/")http://www.intellect...roperty.gov.uk/(/url).
This is a UK site, but the agreements are international, and the site links appropriately to the various international bodies.
Ownership of a trademark does not prevent someone else from discussing your product by its name, or from claiming that their product is compatible with your product.
What it does prevent someone from doing is passing off their product as your product, or claiming endorsement or association, or trying to selling identical services using your trademark or one sufficiently similar to cause confusion to the public.
There are, for example, zillions of shareware products out there for the Mac OS, but nobody is required to get approval from Apple in order to release them, even though Mac OS is a trademark. However, if you were to release a rival OS and call it Moc OS, and use a graphical representation similar to Apple's, you would find yourself in trouble.
In fact, Apple itself is in trouble now because an earlier agreement with Apple (the company formed by the Beatles) stated that Apple (computer) would not provide music services, and Apple (music) are now claiming that Apple (computer) are doing just that with the iTunes site. In this case, the issue is one of pre-existing contract which is more enforceable than Trademark, however, the principle is the same: selling of identical services (ie, music distribution) using a pre-registered trademark.
Infringement of trademark is not dependent on remuneration — the Star Wars plugins are technically illegal, but Lucasfilms have not pursued them very hard. On the other hand, early Star Trek plugins had to be pulled because the owners of the Star Trek franchise complained - even though no money was changing hands.
It would be acceptable to commercially market your plugin shrink-wrapped on supermarket shares for $300, provided that you did not explicitly or implicitly make the claim that your product was endorsed by Ambrosia or an official accompaniment to EV Nova. If you decided to include a copy of Nova in your package, you would have to make it very clear that additional monies were payable to Ambrosia, that by buying your software the purchaser was not purchasing a copy of Nova, and that the Nova software was included for convenience only. Even then, you would need to check the Nova licence carefully.
On the other hand, if you were to then go on and create your own game engine which was functionally similar to Nova and market it as EV Nuovo, you would probably find Ambrosia's lawyers on you pretty sharply.
They would not necessarily win. Some of us will remember a Playstation emulator of MacOS which was very popular a couple of years ago. The makers were able to demonstrate that they had not reverse engineered Playstation hardware, and the fact that they claimed it was compatible with Playstation games, while acknowledging that they did not own the Playstation Trademark, was seen as not being a breach of TradeMark. I forget how the whole thing ended, but I think that Sony may have actually bought the product up.
Having been professionally on both sides of TradeMark disputes, I would humbly suggest that it's worth checking the law carefully before posting advice about it on these boards — and even then you can still be wrong.
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M A R T I N • T U R N E R
(url="http://"http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/cgi-bin/vftp/show.pl?product=evo&category;=plugins&display;=downloads&file;=FrozenHeart104.sit.bin")Frozen Heart(/url)
(url="http://"http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/cgi-bin/vftp/show.pl?product=evo&category;=plugins&display;=downloads&file;=FemmeFatale.sea.bin")Femme Fatale(/url)
(url="http://"http://www.ambrosiasw.com/cgi-bin/vftp/dl-redirect.pl?path=evo/plugins&file;=Frozen Heart - the No.hqx")Frozen Heart - the Novel(/url)
(This message has been edited by Martin Turner (edited 11-02-2003).)
(This message has been edited by Martin Turner (edited 11-02-2003).)
