Friday, September 26, 2008
Google Lawyers Playing Hardball
I found an interesting story over at Sphinn the other day. It involves a small Google Chrome fan website that discusses plugins for the new browser by Chrome on one side, and the corporate lawyers for Google on the other. The website is Chrome Plugins. The post that discusses the details on this is Google Says You Can't Use Chrome Stuff.
Without going into all of the details (they are discussed fully at Chrome Plugins), the basic issue here is that Chrome Plugins is a non-commercial site that is run by an individual to support the development of the Chrome browser by Google. This Google Chrome browser was an "open source" project by Google, meaning that the development of it is a community project, where developers will add to the basic engine created by Google by creating plugins to make it more powerful. This concept is virtually identical to the famous Firefox browser that has had huge success. In short, Chrome Plugins was using a cartoon shown by Chrome on their site, and Chrome Plugins was displaying the "Google" and "Chrome" logo on their small site. Google's lawyers threated Chrome Plugins with legal action if they did not remove the cartoon and logos.
While this would ordinarily be a fairly simple story of trademark infringement on behalf on Chrome Plugins, this case is actually a little more complicated. Why?
1- Chrome Plugins is a non-commercial site. The website does not make a penny from it.
2- The cartoon was not created by Google. It was created by an artist and displayed on Google's site under a seperate agreement. While the artist may have an issue with chrome Plugins, I'm not sure how Google could have legal standing on the usage of the cartoon by Chrome plugins when the cartoon does not belong to Google.
3- The usage of the Google Chrome logos may fall under a "fair usage" exemption under trademark and copyright law.
I would like to go into more details on this later, but I wanted to quickly outline the issues, as I understand them. From what I have read so far, it appears that the Google lawyers are certainly playing hardball with Chrome Plugins, and I'm really not sure why they are doing this when the site is a developer's site that is doing nothing but helping Google by its actions. This is very strange behavior, to say the least.
What do you think?
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Malpractice Blog
I found what appears to be a new malpractice blog. It's actually fairly interesting so far. It looks like it's only a few days old, but the subject, malpractice, interests me. malpractice is actually a fairly broad category that covers all sorts of professionals from lawyers, doctors, architects, dentists, veterinarians, and more.
If you want to take a look at the new blog, and tell the owner I sent you please, just head here: malpractice blog.
