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Ian
I hate to be the one to tell you but someone in the election business other than Global is using the name GEMS. I saw the doucments Mirco-Vote sent Shelby last year and they referred to their election management software as GEMS( geographical election management software). I informed Larry E. of this fact and suggested we immediately apply for trademark protection before we had the same problem as with AccuTouch. I just recently (within the last few weeks) inquired if we had applied and Larry said not yet but we would. That's the last I heard about it until I read your message. Regards
Ian Piper wrote: 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 |