Hi Tako and all,
I suppose I have been remiss in not saying something here, but since
most SAOL users aren't the right sort of stakeholder, it is only for
informational purposes, not for action.
A (IMHO) badly-behaved company called Global Music One created a
new proprietary audio format and chose to call it MP4. This is
confusing enough, but they are also pursuing trademark status
on the word "MP4" itself so that they can prohibit others from
using it. Obviously (IMHO) this would be a very bad thing from
the point of view of the standard.
I have been tracking the situation for some time; the US Patent
and Trademark Office allows for official Opposition to claims of
trademarks. There is a one-month window between the initial review
by USPTO and official issuance of the trademark for opposition.
This opposition period was from April 26 to May 25, 2000 (that is,
today was the last day). I helped to organize several MPEG
companies to submit Opposition documents on this trademark. MIT
also submitted one.
The opposition we have collaboratively developed has two parts.
First, MPEG has been using "MP4" in public documents to refer to
the official MPEG-4 File Format for years, much longer than GMO
has been using it. Second, GMO's use of "MP4" is, we argue,
deceptively misdescriptive of their product, since using this
term will make consumers think that their technology is
MPEG-4 compliant. Either of these points is sufficient to
vacate the trademark application if USPTO agrees with us.
Now there will be some period of review and, likely, adversarial
argument with GMO. I'll keep the list posted.
The most important thing is that no MPEG-4 user (SAOL user, for
example) should feel any pressure to select a file extension other
than .mp4 for their data. There is no legal reason for this, and
in fact, if many people are using .mp4 to represent MPEG-4 data,
it hurts GMO's trademark claim.
At this point, there is no other useful action to be taken since
the opposition deadline has passed.
The price of open standards, as of freedom, is eternal vigilance!
Best to all,
-- Eric
+-----------------+
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-----Original Message-----
From: Sjaak <tsteinz@dds.nl>
To: saol-users@media.mit.edu <saol-users@media.mit.edu>
Date: Thursday, May 25, 2000 4:51 PM
Subject: Help protect the MP4 name from being trademarked???
>hi everyone...
>
>We (from saol.net) read this article at the mpeg-4 industry forum:
>
>http://www.m4if.org/mp4.html
>
>We don't understand...what happens now. Will mpeg-4 audio get another
>extention (not .mp4)??
>And does somebody have an idea what that extension would be? Where a
>little
>bit confused here.
>
>
>regards,
>Tako Steinz
>Peter Maas
>Peter van der Noord
>
>
>aswer from John Lazzaro:
>
>> Good questions -- I bet Eric, Giorgio, and the gang know the answer,
>>since they are on the internal mailing lists, ect. So, I'd suggest
>>posting the question to saol-users and see what they say. There is
>>case law about file-name extensions -- someone got a trademark on
>>the .arc extension for file compression, and forced everyone to not
>>use it. And that's how .zip files came to be ... this was 15 years ago
>>now I guess, the guy who named .zip just died a few weeks ago.
>
>>So its not out of the question they could actually come after
>UCBerkeley
>>if I didn't change sfront not to recognize .mp4 extensions, but
>realistically,
>>the odds of that happening seem really low ...
>
> --jl
>
>
>
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