This may be a bit off topic.
I received a forwarded message that originated from lindows.com. They
are in a suit with Microsoft regarding the use of "Lindows,com".
Microsoft is suing Lindows for trademark violation. In the message,
Michael Robertson, with Lindows, is looking for old documentation of the
use of the word "windows" and "windowing" prior to 1983. I can't think
of a better resource than this list to find these references. The
relevant part of the forwarded message is quoted below.
Maybe some of the list members can provide the needed info to
lindows.com
Martin Marshall
________________quote from forwarded
message______________________________________________
Microsoft Corp. v. Lindows.com Update
Some of you have sent me email asking for an update on the battle with
Microsoft and wanting to
know how you can help. In case you missed it, Microsoft sued to shut
down Lindows.com earlier in
the year. It was a transparent attempt to stifle the inevitable
competition which Linux represents.
Their allegation was (and is) that they own the trademark for the word
"windows," maintaining that
no other company should be allowed to use the word "windows" -- not
even the "indows" portion.
Of course, there are hundreds of products and companies that use the
word "windows" - and
Microsoft has never filed suit against any of them. That's a huge clue
that this suit has little to do
with trademark confusion. (If you missed any part of the proceedings
to date, visit
http://www.lindows.com/opposition to read the court papers and
summaries.)
Many people have congratulated us, prematurely, on our victory. While
the judicial system did block
their request to shut us down, a trial is looming for April 2003. At
that time, the Judge (or jury) will
decide whether Microsoft has a valid trademark for the word "windows"
and whether the
Lindows.com name is confusing. In the interim, we're moving through
the legal process where
Microsoft is demanding, as part of the discovery process, everything
from our business plan to our
list of partner companies. As you can imagine, it's challenging for a
39-person company to
compete with a Goliath that has hundreds of people--just in the legal
department alone. This is
where we could use a bit of help from our community of Insiders and
those on our mailing list.
While Microsoft can outspend us with high-priced lawyers and experts,
they cannot buy history. We
know, of course, that the word "windows" had been used in the industry
for years before Microsoft
adopted it in the early 1980s for the name of its windowing interface
product, Microsoft Windows
1.0. We could, however, use your help in gathering as much evidence as
possible to show the usage
of the words "windows", "window" and "windowing" before and after
1983, the date Microsoft first
filed its trademark application. If you have magazine or newspaper
articles, academic papers,
journal articles, product manuals, advertisements, textbooks,
dictionaries, or anything else that uses
the terms, we'd like to hear from you. We'd also like to hear from
anyone who had personal
experience in the industry during those early years and can recall the
history of the early
windowing products such as Xerox's Star, VisiCorp's VisiOn, Apple's
Lisa, Digital Research's GEM,
Quarterdeck's DesQ, IBM's TopView, and others. Please email all your
findings to
legal_at_lindows.com.
As always, thanks for all your help.
Michael Robertson
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Received on Tue Aug 13 2002 - 19:47:00 BST