On Tue, 2005-08-23 at 22:59 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
I complete fail to understand your logic.
I noticed this. ;-> It appears your engineers/developers did too, and too late if I might add.
How can a company have a written agreement about its own source?
You didn't. You had a binding agreement on what IP usage of company B was and was not appropriate, including its trademarks. Company B could be completely oblivious of your uses of even your own source code or other uses of their trademark, until they found out about it. That's when there might be a problem.
I don't know how to make it clear.
Of course not. In your mind, company A's source code had nothing to do with company B's trademarks.
But company A had agreed, _in_writting_, not to misappropriate various IP of company B. Most of these including not misappropriating trademarks, even for internal-only usage.
Company A and Company B had absolutely nothing to do with each other. Company A bought nothing from Company B. Company B bought nothing from Company A. Company A licensed nothing from Company B. Company B licensed nothing from Company A.
What did you mean by ... ???
"Company A did license the executable, for execution only on proprietary hardware which it designed and manufactured."
Perhaps this will help: Suppose you wrote some software, and called it SoftX in the comments in your source code. Suppose you sell SoftX, and use promotional literature using the term "SoftX". Later, without any relationship between us, (I in fact live in another country and know nothing about you) I trademark the term "SoftX" in my country, which has treaties with your country. Then I find out that you are using that term. I contact you, and instruct you that you are using my trademark, and insist that you cease and desist forthwith. THAT is what happened.
Wait, are you saying "company A" _did_ sell the software, with promotional literature using the trademark, to the public?
I can't follow your comments at all. Please use your A, B, C?, D? nomenclature in more detail.
P.S. I worked in Telecomm, where the license agreement for our software was $6,000,000.00 USD.
Oh, you definitely had a licensing agreement that forbid misappropriation of trademarks. ;->
But I'm still confused here.