From owner-freebsd-current Sun Aug 22 9:56:41 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from home.dragondata.com (home.dragondata.com [204.137.237.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DC9AB15518; Sun, 22 Aug 1999 09:56:37 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from toasty@dragondata.com) Received: from dino (dino [204.137.237.6]) by home.dragondata.com (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id LAA01802; Sun, 22 Aug 1999 11:56:31 -0500 (CDT) Message-Id: <4.2.0.58.19990822114423.00ad3cc0@nfs.dragondata.com> X-Sender: toasty@nfs.dragondata.com X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.2.0.58 Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 11:56:29 -0500 To: Andrzej Bialecki , Kevin Day From: Kevin Day Subject: Re: "The Matrix" screensaver, v.0.2 Cc: Narvi , "Daniel C. Sobral" , Nik Clayton , freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: References: <4.2.0.58.19990822095052.00ad17c0@nfs.dragondata.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG At 06:44 PM 8/22/99 +0200, Andrzej Bialecki wrote: >On Sun, 22 Aug 1999, Kevin Day wrote: > >[trademark violation warning] > >Ok, maybe you have a point - I dont know, I'm not a lawyer. But with this >line of reasoning they could claim that anything using falling letters >effect on your screen partly violates they trademarked special effect, >which is silly. > >What can we do, then? Why don't we ask them politely if it's ok? > >Andrzej Bialecki While I can't speak for how Warner Brothers' lawyers are, as a general rule.. "It's much easier to say No, than it is to say Yes, and regret it later." If you ask, you'll probably get a No. It's not that you made a falling letter effect, it's that you made a falling letter effect to copy the effect in the movie, and it does look very much like what's in the movie. That could be called willful infringement. While I doubt they'd stop a fan from making something like this, (I don't know this for a fact though, see what Paramount did with Trek sites before, or Mattel with Barbie) they may be more led to taking action against a product being sold that contains it. (FreeBSD being sold by Walnut Creek and others). If this is distributed as a fan based thing, the worst they'd likely do is say "Take it down.". If this is on thousands of FreeBSD cd's, it could become a financial problem if they want to take it far enough. This is just my opinion though, and not to be used as legal advice for anyone. I just don't want FreeBSD to become a ball of intellectual property infringements. :) Kevin To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message