Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!uw-june!uw-entropy!dataio!bright
From: bright@Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Phil Katz (PKARC author) sued by SEA (ARC author)
Keywords: katz,sea,pkarc,pkxarc,arc,suit
Message-ID: <1572@dataio.Data-IO.COM>
Date: 20 Jun 88 18:28:33 GMT
References: <8084@brl-smoke.ARPA> <1755@looking.UUCP>
Reply-To: bright@dataio.Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright)
Organization: Data I/O Corporation; Redmond, WA
Lines: 13

In article <1755@looking.UUCP> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes:
>On the other hand, it's obvious that PKARC misuses SEA's ARC trademark,
>and they should be required to make that right.  But let the judge
>decide.

What's trademarked? You can't trademark the name 'ARC'. You can only
trademark 'ARC' if the 3 letters are written in a distinctive style, which
isn't possible using ascii! There has to be something distinctive or unusual
about a word or phrase to make it trademarkable, for obvious reasons.

Besides, ARC is a pretty generic name. I've even written a program called
ARC back before I ever heard of SEA. I've seen many programs called AR,
or ARCHIVE, or ARCH over the years, all doing pretty similar things to ARC.