patents and trademarks

[Curtis Clark]

At 06:37 AM 02/04/97 -0700, JOSEPH E. LAFERRIERE wrote:
>2) What are systematists supposed to call the thing if
>they are not allowed to use the name without permission?
>Is someone doing a monograph on the genus required to
>pay royalties to use the name?

One of the purposes of a trademark is to prevent others from using the name
for similar products. I'm no lawyer, but I seem to remember reading that
courts in the U.S. had established that using the same or similar name for
a totally unrelated product was not trademark infringement. If the purpose
of trademarking a binomial is to prevent someone else from applying the
same name to another species, perhaps this indicates that the company's
lawyers were unaware of the ability of the rules of nomenclature to do
exactly that.


------------------------------------------------------------------------
Curtis Clark                       http://www.is.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
Biological Sciences Department                     Voice: (909) 869-4062
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