[Kde-games-devel] RFC: Rename KBattleShip and KTron

[Ryan Rix]

Hello all,

I'd like to bring up an idea that I and the Fedora KDE SIG hope will be 
considered for the KDE SC 4.5 timeframe, namely the renaming of KBattleShip 
and KTron to names that do not conflict with active trademarks on the term 
"Battleship" (owned by Hasbro games)[1][2] and "Tron" (owned by Disney)[3]

Now, as a German based project, I am not sure regarding the respect of US 
Trademark laws, but in the US this leads to problems for distributions bound 
to US Trademark laws (for example RHEL and Fedora, both associated with Red 
Hat, Inc, based in Raleigh, North Carolina; Ubuntu and Canonical are probably 
bound by them too, but I'm not sure that they respect these specific 
trademarks) in that we cannot ship applications with these names. For specific 
agreement with this from Fedora's Legal Team, please see comments 6 and 12 in 
[1].

Currently, Fedora and RHEL ship custom patches to rename these two 
applications KSinkShips and KSnakeDuel[4], respectively, but these are a major 
pain to refactor at each new release, and this is a fairly large patch to 
maintain. 

As such, the Fedora KDE team is requesting that the applications be renamed to 
something that does not possibly conflict with US trademarks on the games the 
kdegames packages are based on.

Thanks everyone,
Ryan Rix
Fedora KDE Special Interests Group

[1]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=481507
[2]: http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4003:q2gahm.3.10
[3]: http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4001:uguoai.2.41
([2] and [3] have various other trademarks owned on both for the 
implementations of the names and similar uses as we currently have)
[4]: http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/devel/kdegames/kdegames-4.3.85-
trademarks.patch?revision=1.1&view=markup

-- 
Ryan Rix
Fedora KDE SIG Member, Phoenix AZ Ambassador, News KDE Beat writer

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