[Kde-games-devel] Potential trademark issues: ktron, ksokoban, kbattleship not in Fedora Core

[Andreas Beckermann]

On Monday 01 August 2005 11:34, Matt R wrote:
> Hi,

Hi

> I've been trying out Fedora Core 4, and I upgraded kdegames from 3.4.0 ->
> 3.4.2, only to discover that ktron had been removed. Being quite fond of
> the game, I  contacted the FC4 package maintainer, and, apparently, several
> games (ktron, ksokoban and kbattleship) were removed back in August 2002
> because they were judged to be "potentially trademarked". ktron had only
> slipped back into the package by mistake.

Could you contact the FC4 package maintainer again and ask him if he ever let 
the authors of these games know about this? And if not - why not?
I cannot remember any notice concerning trademarks on existing games on 
kde-games-devel since its creation at least.

There has been a mail by Ian Wadham more than 1.5 years ago proposing to use 
the search on this website before naming a game:
www.uspto.gov

> I couldn't find anything about this issue in the archives of this list; is
> there a genuine trademark concern here? For ktron, presumably the worry is
> about the film "Tron", where they have a light-cycle race; and for
> kbattleship, presumably there's a trademarked boardgame, etc.

The website mentioned above tells me that "sokoban" and "battleship" are 
indeed trademarked. I am not so sure about "tron" (the website is not really 
easy to use imho), but after a google search I think it is, too.

I propose we rename all three games in order to avoid legal problems. This is 
especially important, as they actually _are_ clones of the games the 
trademark applies to (they don't "just have the same name").

I am CC'ing the maintainers (according to bugs.kde.org) of these games. Do you 
have any opinion on this? Or maybe proposals for new names?

> -- Matt

CU
Andi