On 2018年02月13日 15:38, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
he's calling into question my authority and the right as a Copyright Holder of the word - and standard - "EOMA68", chris. that's very very serious. and also publicly recorded. you can double-check that by re-reading the messages.
i am REQUIRED to respond to that - by explicitly asserting that i AM the sole exclusive Copyright Holder of EOMA68 and that i AM the sole exclusive authority over the EOMA68 Standard, and that i cannot tolerate people claiming that they are blithely and arbitrarily permitted to ignore my authority under Copyright Law.
Luke, I hope you don't find this to be pedantic, but if you do, I would point out that RMS is very vocal about this point.
Copyright and trademark law are *not* the same thing. You can't hold a copyright on a name, only a trademark. This is an important distinction because the way copyright and trademark laws operate is not the same.
As far as being "required to respond", I assume you are referring to the possibility of genericide of a trademark, when you lose a trademark because you fail to inform the public how it is properly used, causing it to be used to mean something more generic, e.g. if people started calling SEGA video games "Nintendos". This has nothing to do with "liability". It just has to do with whether or not a particular name can still be trademarked.
Either that, or perhaps you are referring to some other law which is neither copyright nor trademark, and spreading confusion by using two wrong terms.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice.