Re: Java Soft-Real-Time Processor (JSRTProc)

Lew wrote:
Lew wrote:
Your devolvement into /ad hominem/ argument bespeaks a weakness in your actual case.

Larry K. Wollensham wrote:
You're joking. I'm trying to have a civil discussion here, and to try (with gentle reminders) to keep it within the bounds of civility, and for this you attack me and assert that my arguments are weak?

That is not an attack on you, it's simply pointing out that by avoiding the points I actually made you were failing to defend your arguments.

Very clever. Avoiding the points I actually made by falsely accusing me of avoiding the points you actually made.

Lew wrote:
you silly person.

Larry K. Wollensham wrote:
Pot. Kettle. Black.

I meant that in the nicest way.

How wonderful for you. It was still an /ad hominem/ attack in a post that consisted largely of accusing me of same.

I point out again that your argument that one shouldn't call SourceForge programmers murderers is valid in and of itself, but has nothing to do with what I claimed.

It has plenty to do with what you claimed. It is silly -- no, frankly ludicrous to equate not doing what Big Brother Business tells you to do and murder. You took my advocacy of civil disobedience against businesses overstepping their legal authority and suggested that it implied that I advocated anyone committing any kind of crime so long as they honestly disagreed with the law and had like-minded people to hide among.

I did nothing of the sort.

I pointed out three facts:
1. Some of Sun's demands go well beyond what is strictly enforceable
under many countries' trademark laws. (I have cited some fairly
strong evidence for this in a different post recently.)
2. Although it is legal to do things that Sun demands you not do but
that lie outside the bounds of what they can legally enforce, Sun
can still sue you and make your life miserable if they take notice
of you. Even though they likely wouldn't win if it went all the way
to a verdict, you're probably better off avoiding that.
3. If you're just one of a large crowd behaving similarly, it's much
less likely you'll be singled out than if you stand alone.

The third item no longer applies to this specific case, though, now that it's become apparent that Arne is a Sun Microsystems shill rather than an independent person, and given that he has taken a personal interest in this instance (to the point of taking every arguably-anti-doing-what-Sun-wants argument personally, even). Since the OP has already been singled out by Sun's defacto agent here, the question of how he can avoid being singled out is rendered moot.

That leaves the other advice: abide by the letter of Sun's demands; do so while tweaking their nose about it if at all possible, so as to send the correct political message and not appear to be knuckling under, not to mention for the greater personal satisfaction it will likely entail.

You can't very well duck the points made, call another person out personally, twist their statements into something completely different, then complain when your flawed rhetoric is exposed.

No, you generally can't, not and get away with it, which is why it mystifies me when I see people like you and Arne doing exactly that.

Justification of actionable behavior on the basis that Sun is unlikely to sue you doesn't make the behavior less actionable or more moral.

Disobeying Sun's demands regarding the use of the word "Java", while not actually infringing their trademarks as infringement is defined by law, is not "actionable behavior" by the normal definition of that term. It most certainly is not immoral. In fact, no use of the name "Java" is immoral except to intentionally deceive consumers into thinking something is either Java (when it isn't) or endorsed by Sun (when it isn't), since lying is immoral but trademark infringement is not, in and of itself, immoral. For the most part, though, trademark infringement IS lying, since the main purpose for trademark law is to attack exactly the named behaviors, passing-off and misrepresentations of endorsement. Microsoft was immoral when they tried to pass off a non-fully-compatible Java-like language as true Java, and got sued for it, and rightly so. The OP is contemplating doing nothing of the sort, and what they are contemplating doing does not appear to me to be in any way immoral. Nor technically trademark infringement.

Nonetheless, it is expensive to get sued even if you're almost sure to win if it goes to a judgment. The OP is still advised to either use just "JSRTProc" as the official project name, or to seek legal counsel. Morals sometimes have to take a backseat to pragmatism, in cases where it's "this isn't immoral so I really should be free to do it, but I might get in trouble for it anyway" rather than "this is immoral but I think it's the easiest way to achieve some eminently worthwhile goal". (The latter sort of thinking is, of course, one of the better-known roads to hell.)

You have refused over several posts to provide evidence for your
assertions

That is a damn lie! I have cited and quoted the International Trademark Association among providing other evidence.

Besides, for the most part, I've stated opinions that you personally don't agree with rather than made assertions. And the "points" you seem to think I ignored included several of your own opinions, which you'd treated as if they were matters of fact. I may have actually ignored some of those, but I only have to address actual facts and evidence; mere dissenting opinions do not constitute arguments for your side that need to be addressed.

Instead you have turned arguments on their head and attempted to make
the discussion personal.

No, that is what you have done.

You have failed to acknowledge that those of us espousing
non-infringement

That would be all of us. I have never suggested that anyone actually infringe anything. Your sneaky and indirect suggestion to the contrary is a dirty dishonest lie!

the difference between referring to compatibility, e.g., "a library for Java programmers", and actually using the trademark in the name of one's product, e.g., "Java Soft-Real-Time Processor".

These are not, as you seem mistakenly to think, mutually exclusive.

People are free to disregard Sun's explicit rules for use of their trademark. You are certainly free to try to convince Usenet readers that such practice is both safe and justifiable. I aver that it is neither, and that people risk trouble with Sun if they attempt to do as you suggest.

I have claimed only that it is justifiable, and only where the disregard does not extend to committing genuine trademark infringement. I have explicitly disavowed that it is safe; the phrase "safety in numbers" should properly be read as "relative safety" of course, and I believe I made it clear elsewhere that it is quite imperfect as a safety net.

There seems to be a bit of a political difference here. You see, I am somewhat libertarian-leaning, and recognize the existence and importance of concepts in intellectual property law such as fair-dealing. You (and Arne) appear to be staunch authoritarians who wrongly believe that companies have, or should have, the right to absolute control over all uses of their trademarks and similarly, and that to go against their wishes is wrong even where it is not actually illegal.

There is, of course, a simple /reductio ad absurdum/ of the latter set of political beliefs. Supposing you got elected and made it the law of the land that companies now did have absolute power over the use of just their actual company names (and not even their other trademarks -- so Sun Microsystems but not Java). They could demand that others not use their names in any way they didn't expressly give advance permission for, for example, and they could enforce those demands with steep fines and maybe even jail time, no matter how much it might once have qualified as "fair dealing".

Well, first of all we're going to have to come up with a new name for that big glowy thing in the sky.

Furthermore, there go all the negative reviews and publicity, "Fooco's new toy is unsafe" type reports, and so forth. Fooco can rest assured that its reputation is firmly under its own control, and so what if thousands of kids needlessly get strangled or suffocated or something where they could have been warned? They were just kids, penniless and many of them doomed to long-term unemployment these days anyway. Fooco has a multi-billion-dollar brand to protect, and by God they have the right to protect it! Warning those kids' parents would have been illegal, immoral, and a horrible thing to do to a defenseless multi-billion-dollar corporation like Fooco that's just trying to survive and make a profit in hard economic times, and yes, making a profit is Fooco's god-given right, not a privilege to be dispensed or withheld at the whim of the market or on the basis of whether their products are safe or are actually better than the competition or anything like that. Why, making their actual products superior would cost too much money when budgets are tight!

Not to mention you'd lose one of the things you Yanks claim to cherish so much, that precious free speech right of yours, which you often mistakenly seem to think is a uniquely American thing. (We have some free speech guarantees here in Australia, for starters.) Companies would quickly exhaust our dictionary of freely-usable words under Lew's Super-Duper Extra-Strength Trademark Law(tm). The corporate plunder of public resources would reach its logical conclusion. Forget Antarctic resources, or getting that inconveniently-located national park's protected status revoked so it can be logged to a stubble and then strip-mined in the almighty name of Profit, the dictionary is where the REAL money is to be made!

But fortunately, we live in the real world, where trademark law has limits and you are unlikely to be elected, and moreover, even if you were, you'd have to somehow get your insanity approved by 51% of the lower house and then 51% of the upper house (after first passing a repeal of the first amendment to your American constitution of course).

Perhaps I am mistaken.

I think it has become quite obvious now that you are.

It is a slippery moral slope to suggest that they should try to get away with an apparent infringing behavior because they probably won't get caught.

It is not, however, a slippery moral slope to suggest that they *could* (but probably *shouldn't*) try to get away with an apparently undesired-by-Sun-but-not-actually-infringing behavior because there's a good chance that they won't get singled out for a questionable lawsuit.

At this point, however, the question of their odds of being singled out is moot, because it turns out that in effect they already had been. Arne is apparently not just a random person here, but personally has ties to Sun Microsystems, and probably is their unofficial watchdog in this newsgroup -- and self-appointed to that role, I expect. (His failure to disclose this (while not making an active effort to conceal it, I admit) is one of several mildly-to-moderately-dishonest things he has done here that I've witnessed lately. He spends quite a lot of time and energy barking at other people about morals, or simply because he believes them to be idiots, so this is rather ironic. What was that proverb again, the one about stones and glass houses?)
.

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