Two thoughts:
- What Excite is doing seems an awful lot like what my supermarket
does -- when I buy a Dole Fruit Juice (for example) product I am very
likely to be handed a coupon for a Welsh product during checkout.
- I liked the 'burger" analogy and would like to offer one closer
to home for me. As a librarian I often have patrons ask me to use
"Infotrac". This is a product we don't have, and I steer them to
the competing product which we do have (Ebscohost). Am I infringing
on Gale's (maker of Infotrac) trademark by responding to a
trademark-name request with information about a competing product?
Would it make any difference if the library next door had Infotrac
and I knew it? This is absurd! Excite is in a sense an artificial
intelligence version of a reference librarian, and we all the time
steer people from a particular brand name to some other IP (we call
it information) which suits their needs and which we own in our
collection.
I'm sorry the judge chose such a stupid argument about the generic
meanings of playboy and playmate as part of her opinion, since that's
totally irrelevant to the main issue, which seems clearly about lack
of product identification confusion by the customer/user.
---
Melissa Belvadi
Systems and Services Librarian,
Maryville University Library, St. Louis, MO 63141
silvest[_at_]maryville.edu (314) 529-9531 fax (314) 529-9941
Received on Wed Jul 28 1999 - 19:07:29 GMT