Oracle justified its JavaScript trademark with Node.js–now it wants that ignored

Obviously I'm not paying for the lawyers but it feels like "oh Oracle is trying to add months of delays" feels pretty normal. Only months! If the process just trudges along for a couple of years before reaching a "good" conclusion, still worth doing!

And very happy that this is an actual legal proceeding and "try to sign a petition asking Oracle nicely" is no longer what is being looked at. It's Oracle!

Imagine how far along ago we would be[0] if 2 years ago the lawyers started getting involved. Sometimes you just gotta do the thing that takes forever. Or at least try in parallel?

[0]: Again, I'm not paying for the lawyers or doing anything useful at all!

Yes, those are old by now, but it's still a blast from the past.

Last time I tried to start a legal action to claim damages against a big company for a very clear-cut case full of obvious fraud and deception (with plenty of evidence and many witnesses). I couldn't find a single lawyer willing to take my case for a share of the proceeds. The defendant was sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars in questionably-obtained cash and assets. To me, this is proof that the legal system is broken. It means the lawyers knew that the odds of winning were extremely low, regardless of the evidence.

I told them about the large amounts of money involved and told them my situation; many of them didn't even ask about what evidence I had. That's how unlikely it is to win a legal case for a non-corporate entity; lawyers won't even lift a finger about a case involving millions and literal fraud if the plaintiff doesn't have the right status, exposure or business connections.

If this is how they deal with the creator of Node.js with the support of Brendan Eich (who literally invented JavaScript), then imagine how they deal with the rest of us who aren't high-exposure individuals.

What's the point of even having a legal system if it only works for certain people?

see https://blogs.oracle.com/java/post/multilingual-engine-execu...

> The major implementations of JavaScript are in the browsers built by Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Microsoft

Isn't MS's browser just Chromium? Weird to add them to the list when they don't build a browser any more. Why not add Brave, etc?

Since literally no one associates JavaScript with Oracle, unless aware of the name history and company acquisition history, it isn't a valid identifier of the source of "JavaScript", and should be canceled or transferred to an organization like EcmaScript International.

"JavaScript" was not a good choice of name to begin with. The original JavaScript did not have much in common with Java.

There would be good support and we could do it fairly swiftly. To hell with Oracle.

They also state that they expect to win on the generic-ness aspect of the suit at trial with the relevant audience (hah).

Most likely we'll see Oracle send out C&Ds to uses of Javascript without the (tm) Oracle for a few months before a trial starts. Whether that will be enough to convince a judge and/or jury that they haven't abandoned the trademark is another question.

The issue is statement 17 of your filing is factually incorrect, as Oracle details in their motion to dismiss. The form, without that specimen, is still valid; the most the court could do is to strike that image from the record and everything else would remain unchanged.

I'm not a lawyer, but from what I understand, you need standing to proceed with a claim. Standing here means that you were harmed or affected by the claim, and are seeking relief (i.e. asking the court to do/order something for you). The problem here, as Oracle points out, is that you were not harmed by the misrepresentation of the specimen. The USPTO was harmed by the misrepresentation, not you.

A way around this issue would be if the USPTO delegated its authority to bring-misrepresentation-concerns to any applicant willing to pay the court costs. You'd have to check if any law delegated that authority (for judicial action), or if there's a separate form, process, or procedure used to handle the delegation (outside of judicial action).

A similar example of this in action is EPA violations; for many cases, no individual has standing to bring the court action needed to address the harm being done. So the EPA was given that standing by law. Then the EPA delegates that authority as needed, or acts on its own.

I think you should drop this claim and continue with the others, and look into how USPTO handles immaterial but knowingly-false information. They probably have some mechanism, so that people don't just... throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

Clown world. We go about thinking our legal system might have some flaws but generally "works"

I like this, as a simple yet powerful slogen!

If Deno wins this battle will that make we want use Deno more?

Despite not being objectively better than competitors OracleBase is wildly successful and basically takes over the OSS RDBMS space. Multiple other projects and vendors are building on your specs. A popular and extensive ecosystem develops around it. Many peoples careers are invested in its growth and success.

One day you wake up in a cold sweat, suddenly remembering that the old trademark you licensed years ago is still there, pointed at your cathedral like a nuclear missile, with Larry Ellison's finger on the trigger.

What's insane is how much of the culture he controls. In tech and outside. He's about to own the largest entertainment company, he owns some of the best real estate in the world, and he owns MySQL and Java.

Genius (or maybe evil genius).

They didn't really enforce the trademark.

2. The below quote from the article has a poignant innocence to it. Not as unhinged as Mullenwrg but still as deluded.

I created Node.js and released it under the MIT license to benefit developers, not so it could be used as a legal pawn by a Fortune 500 company. Now, instead of correcting their misrepresentation, they’re using it to stall the case.

Who wants Oracle to start controlling it?

We're mostly better off leaving it a gray area maybe until Oracle gets more aggressive with it.

I get it that Oracle is in the wrong but I’m still not sure why get in this trademark fight anyhow.

I would personally leave it to someone with much larger pockets like Microsoft to deal with.