Techdirt: As pretty much all of you have been sending in, our favorite open source electronics firm, Sparkfun, has found itself in the middle of yet another unfortunate intellectual property issue that highlights how broken intellectual property law continues to be. In short, SparkFun needs to pay to have $30,000 worth of multimeters (2,000 of them) destroyed because they're yellow and because trademark law is stupid.
2 comments:
This seems insane. I took a class spring semester of my freshmen year called Roots of Rock N' Roll. We spent a good amount of time talking about when do we draw that line between new and ripping off. I believe in intellectual property but i also believe making it exceedingly expensive to attain or illegal to use makes progressing take more time. I feel like this law was made to protect small businesses or artist from having their ideas ripped away from them by bigger more affluent companies. And instead its screwing over the little guy and in this case the Earth. I dont know anything about what it takes to change these regulations in terms of time, money, and effort/power but i hope something changes soon.
While I do think that trademark and intellectual property laws are important, I think this application is taking the strict enforcement approach a bit too far. I do see how color scheme is a vital part of some branding, but I see Fluke's color scheme as too broad to be enforced that strictly. Most of the multimeters I've ever used have had very similar colors so why did Customs decide to stop just this shipment? The worst part is that Sparkfun is stuck between a rock and a hard place in this situation and will mostly likely have to just eat the cost of the units. At least Fluke has been generous enough to donate their equipment to help Sparkfun recoup their losses. It's really nice to see companies putting common decency over profit margin.
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