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Intellectual Property Law

Trademarks, Resurrected

By Tim Armstrong, Derek Bambauer, and William McGeveran. (all)

My former employer Lotus has (re)-launched Symphony, an office applications suite that competes with Microsoft Office. (Yes, I know this is like sending Elmo to take on Darth Vader.) Symphony uses Open Document Format, an open standard for application files.

The fun part is that this is the sequel to Symphony - the original, released in 1984, ran on DOS and was named by John Dvorak as one of the 10 worst software disasters. (Symphony is #4, Microsoft Bob is #10. That hurts.) Thus, IBM is recycling a trademark - and one with questionable associations to boot. (That “boot” may take a while if you use Windows.)

From a classical trademarks perspective, this makes sense. Trademarks allow IBM, as the Lanham Act tells us, to “identify and distinguish [its] goods… from those manufactured or sold by others and to indicate the source of the goods.” Computer users see “Symphony” and know immediately that IBM produces the software. (Let’s assume the users understand that IBM bought Lotus back in the 1990s.) As law students learn, trademarks help reduce consumers’ error costs by helping them find goods generated by a particular producer.

But trademarks do much more than that, and this is what interests me.

Full post as published by Info/Law on December 14, 2007 (boomark / email).