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When it comes to trademark
infringement, similar products or services must be involved to prove
infringement. Dissimilarities, such as the application a device is used
for, or even the customer base it is sold to, can be enough to kill a
case.
If you take a look at the Patent
Trademark website www.uspto.gov and look up
GEMS, you'll find a number of patents that exist for a wide variety of
products. The reason why they can share the same name is because the
consumer is not likely to confuse one product with the other. And that is
the name of the game.
The Lexmark AccuFeed is
probably a general paper feeder sold to the general public. The Global
AccuFeed is used only to feed election ballots and is sold only to the
local and county governments. Shouldn't be a problem for us but we'd
probably have to go through a patent lawyer for absolute assurances.
Probably cross that bridge when we get to it.
We probably could have fought for the
use of AccuTouch, and won because of our specific application, but we happened
to be buying the touch panel for the AV-TS from the company (ELO) who
used that name for the touch panel product they sold us. A trademark
lawsuit is not condusive to a stable business relationship.
If anybody tried today to use our
tradename "AccuVote" or "Accu-Vote", we could easily establish that Global had
it first, and that's all you really have to do. We have started to put the
TM symbol on our documentation, to ward off potential patent infringements, but
the best thing we could do is get our trademark registered. You know, the
little R in a circle. At that point, it is listed for all to
see.
Ian
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