RE: [NEW ISSUE] 4103 Questionable use of Contoso Ltd in Primer

>recommendation is not to use company names
>and rather "example Ltd" UNLESS we have a
>written permission from the name

We note that according to US Trademark Office - 'Example' is a registered trademark owned by (REGISTRANT) Duck Creek Technologies, Inc. CORPORATION MISSOURI 1630 S. Killingsworth Avenue Bolivar MISSOURI 65613 [1][2].

Microsoft has regularly used the fictitious company name 'Contoso, Ltd.' in demonstrations and on documentation for a number of years. Microsoft does not object to the W3C use of 'Contoso, Ltd'.

As suggested by Philippe, the http://real.contoso.com/ URI can be replaced with http://real.contoso.example.com/ as outlined in RFC 2606 [3].

[1] http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=9e5jii.2.32
[2] http://www.duckcreektech.com/
[3] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt

Regards,

Asir S Vedamuthu
Microsoft Corporation


-----Original Message-----
From: public-ws-policy-request@w3.org [mailto:public-ws-policy-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Felix Sasaki
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 8:16 PM
To: William Henry
Cc: public-ws-policy@w3.org
Subject: Re: [NEW ISSUE] 4103 Questionable use of Contoso Ltd in Primer


Some further feedback on the issue from a legal expert within W3C:

If one wants to use Contoso Ltd in the Specification and Contoso is a
name owned by a company, we are using their trademark which makes us
vulnerable to litigation and damages. Hence, the recommendation is not
to use company names and rather "example Ltd" UNLESS we have a written
permission from the name and trademark owner giving W3C a perpetual
non-exclusive right to use the name in this specification for a world
wide usage and according to the rules of the W3C document license.

Regards, Felix.

Best,

William Henry wrote:
> I suggest Danasir.com or Danasir Inc.
>
> It seems it's only a proper name not a company:
>
> http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Danasir&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
> <http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Danasir&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8>
>
> :-)
>
> William
>
> On Jan 8, 2007, at 9:35 PM, Felix Sasaki wrote:
>
>>
>> Philippe Le Hegaret wrote:
>> > On Wed, 2006-12-20 at 11:53 -0500, Christopher B Ferris wrote:
>> >> http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=4103
>> >>
>> >> Title: Questionable use of fictitious corp. name "Contoso Ltd."
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > I unfortunately missed the call this week despite Felix asking me to
>> > attend, but looking at the thread and the discussion on issue 4103, I'd
>> > like to point that W3C have guidelines in terms of domain name in
>> > examples:
>> > [[
>> > Domains in examples adhere to section 3, "Reserved Example Second Level
>> > Domain Names," in RFC 2606 [DOMAINS]. Use the domains example.com,
>> > example.org, and example.net for all examples. The Internet Assigned
>> > Numbers Authority (IANA) reserves them for this purpose. If you need an
>> > evocative name, use a machine name (e.g., http://cats.example.org).
>> > ]]
>> > http://www.w3.org/2001/06/manual/#Examples
>> >
>> > Contoso Ltd. doesn't come up as a trademark in the USPTO and a google
>> > search seems to agree with that fact as well. I don't believe we have
>> > guidelines in terms of trademark... yet.
>>
>> I talked to some other people within w3c, it is true that there are no
>> such guidelines yet. One proposal which came up was to use a company
>> name which could be Contoso, but a domain which includes example.com .
>> Hence, we would replace the company name Contoso with
>> Contoso.example.com, an do the same for URIs, e.g.
>> http://real.contoso.com/policy.xml >
>> http://real.contoso.example.com/policy.xml
>>
>> Alternatively, we could pick up "company A" and have
>> http://real.a.example.com/policy.xml
>>
>> Felix
>>
>

Received on Monday, 5 February 2007 22:00:34 UTC