post 197

By anders pearson 13 Nov 2000

intellectual property stupidity knows no bounds. Pillsbury sent Columbia a cease-and-desist letter because of the computer science department’s use of the term “Bake-off” which Pillsbury owns the trademark on. for anyone that doesn’t know it already, “bake off” is a commonly used term in CS referring to the testing of several independent implementations of similar programs or protocols. it’s been used as such for quite a while. for example, RFC 1025 TCP and IP Bake Off was written in 1987 and refers to bake offs. somehow i don’t really think anyone is going to get confused. last time i looked, trademarks didn’t apply outside their original market. if it doesn’t actually have anything to do with food, the trademark doesn’t apply. what the hell are pillsbury’s lawyers thinking?