Adsk vs ODABattle 2

When Autodesk's lawsuit against the Open Design Alliance halted in agreement, Owen debated whether to keep his www.adskvoda.com Web site running. Today, he learned he had a reason.

Autodesk is now asking the American Trademark Trial and Appeal Board to cancel the "OPENDWG" trademark registered by the Open Design Alliance. Read about it here, where Owen also has links to the TTAB site.

I suspect Autodesk will win the request, because DWG quite clearly belongs to them. The ODA would probably have to modify their trademark to read something like "Open DWG for AutoCAD" to indicated that DWG doesn't belong to them.

Comments

[Gary Dary]

If this case is won then the English language as it is known in the U.S will be lost forever.

This is a ridiculous case brought about by
ridiculous company policy.

Perhaps I can claim trademark to my name.
Gaz Simply three letter!
Maybe I can sue for GazMan or even Gazebo.

Or then again this may be a diversion from
the main game...collection on options.

Regards Gaz
P.S can I use that term.

[R.Paul Waddington.]

I think I commented on this during the Autodesk vs ODA hearings and I have not recently checked the status of the the applications but all of Solidworks trade mark applications for their products with the letters dwg in them were being contested by Autodesk, here in Australia and I understand a Brazilian fellow has indicated a similar situation there as well.
I also said our Australain draughting standards books site 'dwg' and 'drg' as a standard abreviations for the word 'drawing' and unless I have trouble reading it would appear to have been the case looong before an upstart called Autodesk came into to being, but that hasn't stopped them for making their own trademark application for 'dwg'.
I think I might apply for a trademark application for a a shape that consists of a left and right leaning line, /\ joined roughly in the centre by a horizontal line, thus - . Can anyone give me an idea what I might call a shApe of this type and some idea if it would stop any one else from using a similar shape.
The only one I can think of would be a company called Autodesk they would have to call themselves autodesk and that wouldn't make much difference would it?;-)

[Martyn Day]

Autodesk failed to protect DWG when it was first used. They are fighting to retrospectively claim it as their own. As everyone in the CAD industry uses it and has a history of using it, I think it wil be a tough task. As things stand Autodesk can't ask people to stop using DWG in their product names (but they could DWF, as ts trademarked). All SoldiWorks DWG products have narked Autodesk but there's not a lot they could do about it.
This will certainly be an interesting case as the ODA trademarked a product name which included the term DWG.