Hi Hanno,
On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 05:47:12PM +0100, Hanno Böck wrote:
I hope this is the right place for such a question.
sure, this is open discussion. Note that if you wanted to ask in German, fsfe-de@ would be another place for questions like this. http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-de
The problem: It's nearly impossible to find a name that isn't used somewhere else.
Actually that is not so hard, one of my favorites links is http://www.dwheeler.com/totro.html Then you can always use an animal or a word in a different language to construct something new and cannot be used easily as a trademark.
And even if the name is absolutely new, you can't be sure if someone thinks that it sounds similar to something else.
It generally is okay to have a sound like something else. The question is: Would a reasonable person find you infringing a trademark? Not all words can be a trademark alone, general words like "book", usually cannot.
Now, how can someone be sure to choose a name for a project and that I won't be sued for it?
Suing can occur anytime even without a cause, there is not absolute certainty. You can only get a reasonable ground.
First try a search engine to see if the term is already used. Secondly think about commercial projects (Free Software or not) that use similiar names; you want to have a distance for this. Third: (optional) get a written statment by a laywer to raise chances. Lawyers, like you, can lookup trademark databases. And they can give some sort of guarantee when they do it for money and in writing.
As there were a lot of strange lawsuits because of project names (e.g. the mobilix-case), it seems nearly impossible to be safe with it.
Any suggestions about that?
Act in good faith, use at least setp 1 and 2 described above.
Bernhard