On Tue, 2005-08-23 at 22:04 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
Company A did license the executable, for execution only on proprietary hardware which it designed and manufactured. Company B later came along and trademarked the term mentioned above. Company B's lawyers informed Company A's lawyers that all use of the now trademarked term belonged solely to Company B, and that any use of Company B's now trademarked term must cease. Company A's lawyers informed all personnel in Company A that all such terms must be removed from all documentation.
Bingo! That's the logic right there. Company A had a _written_ licensing agreement. Public distribution doesn't matter. You had a _written_ licensing agreement.
After the engineers complained that there would be a massive editing effort to modify *comments*, the lawyers of Company A and Company B got together, studied the law, and concluded that, to comply with the law, Company A must perforce modify all documents, including non-disclosed proprietary trade secret source, even in comments, so that the now trademarked term did not appear anywhere.
Yes, because Company A was contractually obligated to terms in its _written_ licensing agreement. Dude, read some of these written agreements sometime. ;->
That is not what the corporate lawyers concluded, and the company spent many $$$ to comply, belive me.
I know, I believe you. But company A (yours I assume) had a _written_ licensing agreement. Doesn't matter that it wasn't on the software itself, it was for a product from company B, and there were trademarks you had agreed to _in_writing_. Even if they come later, read that original, _written_ licensing agreement.
It's different when you do _not_ have something in writing. So your story is 0% applicable.
Perhaps now that the situation is more clear, we can be talking on the same page. (Unless we already were :-)
Yes, we were.
In fact, signing a licensing agreement with LMI might be _worse_. Because if it has clauses that say they can change the terms at any time, they might be able to, depending on how significant.
-- Bryan
P.S. I worked in the semiconductor industry for almost 2 years were the typical _single_user_ software license was over $250,000! You betcha they had references to not using trademarks, and I had to make sure my code and scripts and other custom build tools obeyed them! It sounds like your company made a major oversight and suffered the consequences. ;->