Maybe you've heard of it, some weeks ago one of those braindamaged lazy lawyers who try to get a lot money from absolutely honest people by sueing them down for something absolutely ridiculous did it again.
He registered a (trade?)mark with the same name of the popular and free software virtualdub - without an own real product behind it of course - and started to admonish people linking to the real virtualdub webpage. Just because he intended to make money from the dissuasion, not his virtualdub 'product'. (BTW: This was a german lawyer again. Maybe its because I'm reading
the lawblog to much, but I'm getting the impression that those bastards always are coming from my home country...)
Fortunately, the author of virtualdub wasn't deterred, and altough he doesn't live near germany - namely in the USA - he hired a german lawyer to fight back, and now it looks pretty good for him. Good news!
All this makes me think about what would happen if someone tried this with
Irrlicht. I don't know if I would spend a thousands of euros for a lawyer to defend my rights on this. But I already thought about preventing this situation by buying a mark myself. The problem: They are not that cheap. Especially european or international marks. An Austrian mark is cheaper but wouldn't help at all. And I don't want to start a donation button on irrlicht.sf.net - as far as I estimate this wouldn't pay out at all although still currently about 400 people are downloading irrlicht
each day, and we've about 103.755 project web hits per day. Incredible numbers, if you ask me.