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Subject: Re: 1998 World Computer Chess Championship.

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 11:01:45 12/03/97

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On December 03, 1997 at 08:52:13, Amir Ban wrote:

>On December 03, 1997 at 08:40:20, Chris Carson wrote:
>
>>Well I thought I would see if anyone is interested in
>>discussing this topic.
>>
>>1.  When is this?
>>2.  Opinions on who will show
>>    Deep Blue?  Deep Blue JR ?
>
>Anyone who is planning to show up with a Jr or Junior suffix, prefix, or
>whatever, can expect to draw a lot of heat from certain parties. IBM
>have been duly informed of this.
>
>Amir

I'm not sure what this means, but "junior" is non-trademarkable and
non-copyrightable.  It has already been used far too many times on
different
products.  We even participated in a human tournament years ago with a
program
known as Cray Blitz junior, because the machine we used was far slower
than
the usual big crays we used, and USCF didn't want a wildly incorrect
rating
used for initial seeding.

You ought to get over the "junior" issue, or else pick a more unusual
name.  But Junior, baby, thought, etc are simply too generic to expect
them to be protected by any legal means.  Crafty falls under the same
basic umbrella.  I chose it because I liked it, but I see the word
"crafty"
used all the time, even with respect to chess (this was a crafty move by
black to attempt to trap the bishop...).

To become enlightened on just how tenuous your claim on "junior" is, do
a netsearch.  You'll be amazed.  It's not worth arguing over, nor worth
making waves over.  Before you can make waves, you have to pick a unique
name and trademark it.  That is *very* difficult since most words have
already been used somewhere, and once they are in common use they can't
ever be protected.

Junior means "smaller version".  We even had a machine known as junior
here, it being a smaller version of another machine we had.  That's
common.
As is the word "blitz" in Cray Blitz.  Notice "Dark Thought" which
sounds
like a much more famous program?  Genius can't be claimed either.  too
many
of 'em...




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