By the way, don't go to sparc(dot)org as linked to in the post. It is a malware/attack site. I think the intended link was sparc.com
On the other hand, as I said, if Sun/SI really wants that name, there is likely little Sparkfun can do to stop them taking it.
Edit: Fujitsu is also connected to SI as a founding member.
If they're suing SparkFun it must mean they want to use it in some 'Fun With Sparc' marketing campaign. The agency that came up with the idea is now panicked because they didn't bother to do a domain search prior to the pitch and when it finally came up during last Tuesday's status meeting it was decided to send it to legal and the person 'who handles these things.'
May as well do a trademark search on 'backpedal' while we're at it.
I like SparkFun and have purchased from them. There is absolutely no confusing them with the other guys who push iron (and now databases) for a living.
Seriously. Somebody remind me how hard it's supposed to be to get into law school again? Sure, you gotta protect your client's trademark, but this is ridiculous.
Reminds me of when I worked for a little hardware company and we got an order from RamBus requiring that we disclose all sales we made of devices using RAM chips because we weren't paying them royalties. Our attorney (nice having a lawyer on your Board) just crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash, "they're just on a fishing expedition. I'll wait til they get serious!" Was the last we ever heard of it.
The bad new is that sparkfun is still going to lose even if they get to keep sparkfun.com. When I looked into the cost of defense, even in the right... its likely worth more than all of sparkfun the company put together. Their case seems ever weaker than ours.
I'd heard stories like this before, and thought them to be exaggerations. Surely the insanity couldn't have reached that level. It must just be sour grapes from those companies who were just a little bit shady. If it happened to us, well, we'd just explain that we had no ill intentions, it was an honest mistake, surely no one would confuse our name with... There are people in this world who have decided that its A-OK to make their living antagonizing the clearly innocent. This for me was the biggest shock.
Choose a new name boys, you're patent/trademark activists now, just like me.
Edit: Oh! I'm definitely ordering my Sparkfun hoodie while I still can! If they do lose the name, nothing will say "arduino geek" quite like that defunct nameplate. Wearing that badboy to maker-faire will be like wearing a Lion-O tshirt to comic-con.
Let's hope the two parties can resolve this amicably.
Choosing a domain name/brand is so damn hard. You can think you're in the clear and years later an established company can realise or assert there's a conflict.
Another case of trademark trolling: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=8810200
I live a town over from them and am lucky enough to be able to pick up their beers in any liquor store and it is on tap in any restaurant or bar around here. Their ridge-runner is my choice during winter.
The whole purpose of a trademark is to protect your brand from anything that could be construed as "confusingly similar". Spark and Sparc sound the same and are nearly identical in spelling, and they are both involved in the tech industry.
Whomever made the decision to send a C&D wasn't completely out of line in their reasoning. (Especially since it does not cost a whole lot to send a C&D. It will cost a lot more to take it to court, which I expect will be a factor in SparkFun's decision making process.)
That said, saying the two similar names are in the "tech industry" may not be sufficient justification for the trademark dispute any longer. The industry has so much breadth nowadays and there are so many businesses involved, as long as SparkFun can prove that there is enough differentiation between what they do and what Sparc does they can probably get around it (with some legal tapdancing).
This would probably not be an issue if SparkFun sold handmade chocolate candies :-)
"Of the 244 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 3 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2009-10-22, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2009-10-22.
Malicious software includes 12 trojan(s), 8 exploit(s), 6 scripting exploit(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 2 new process(es) on the target machine."
By the way sparc.com appears to be done right now. Its probably DDOSed by all the people complaining.
I think the SparkFun team is going to lose this one.
