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. -- Bryan J. Smith b.j.smith at ieee.org http://thebs413.blogspot.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The best things in life are NOT free - which is why life is easiest if you save all the bills until you can share them with the perfect woman