BitTorrent to sue misusers of it’s name
Written by Ernesto on February 08, 2006Bram cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol is planning to sue anyone misusing the BitTorrent name, and trademark. The trademark “BitTorrent” has become extremely popular over the last year, and as the popularity of BitTorrent grew, the “moneymakers” started to jump on the bandwagon.
BitTorrent inc. wants to keep it’s name clean and will crack down those people who are using it to distribute spyware or adware.
People who are using the BitTorrent trademark to market their product will have to pay a small licensing fee. The fee is relatively small because BitTorrent inc. don’t need to make money off it, they just use the fee to make sure their name stays clean. The Opera browser is the first company to be a licensed BitTorrent distributor.
In a reaction to Slyck.com Bram Cohen makes clear that existing torrent clients (the spyware free ones) don’t need to worry. On the contrary, he states:
“We would like to work with BitTorrent developers (both future and existing) to verify their implementations to ensure that they are BitTorrent compliant,” Bram explained. “It is our intention to help developers to advise them of actions they can take if their implementations are outside the range of best practices. In fact, the most popular clients are already mostly conformant. The real concern here is spyware companies such as Day Networks who has tried to register our trademark in Europe.”
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4 Responses
well this seems like a good step against the whole adware/spyware spread, but will they really be able to protect the legit programs? i guess we will have to see…
I really am glad to see this happen, the last thing bittorent needs is to be associated with “illegitimate” things, no sarcasm i swear..
haha, not everything is illegitimate most of the torrent websites now say that your not allowed to use them for “illegal purposes” therefore putting the responsibility onto you.
funny thing is, he’s the one who chose to release the protocol… the “BitTorrent protocol”… to the public… IANAL, but doesn’t that make it hard to enforce whatever trademark rights he may have had, before he made it public domain? He hasn’t enforced whatever trademark rights he may or may not still have all this time. It is kinda hard to believe he can just take back something he freely gave away.
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