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We've been hit with a cease-and-desist order!
#19438 12/02/11 03:10 AM
Joined: Aug 2009
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tacit Offline OP
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I sat down this evening to go through my email inbox and was astonished to discover this gem in with all the usual assorted detrius that regularly lands there:

Quote:
To whom it may concern:

This is to inform you that a website you manage, finetunedmac.com, has come to the attention of Rosetta Stone Ltd. ("Rosetta Stone").

Rosetta Stone's automated monitoring software continually monitors, collects and stores instances of unauthorized use, sales or other violations of Rosetta Stone's intellectual property rights on the Internet. Our records indicate that your site, finetunedmac.com, has employed an advertising or sales campaign that may have incorporated Rosetta Stone products and/or trademarks or terms confusingly similar thereto.

In order to ensure your compliance with our request, you should (i) delete “Rosetta”, "Rosetta Stone" and any variations thereof, from your search engine keyword list, and (ii) add "-Rosetta" and "-Rosetta Stone" as negative keywords (negative matching) to your search engine keyword list. If you have questions, the search engine websites explain how this is done.

We believe that there is no legitimate reason or basis for you to rely on any Rosetta Stone trademark, image or product in your marketing or sales campaigns, and encourage you to review all of your advertising campaigns and sites to avoid such practices in the future.

Sincerely,

BrandEnforcement@rosettastone.com
Rosetta Stone Ltd.


So I sat down and fired off this response, which I cc'd to Apple's legal email address. What do you think, was I too formal?

To whom it may concern:

Your IP department appears to have gone mad.

I can't tell if it's too much time spent listening to crappy language tutorials on CD or too much time spent shooting moodily lit photographs of said CDs to appear in Skymall magazine, but Fine Tuned Mac does not, and never has, used any Rosetta Stone image, product, brand name, trademark, or any other intellectual property for any reason.

In fact, I am quite baffled (German: verdutzt; French: déconcerté; Italian: sconcertato; Finnish: hämmentynyt) by your email. Try as I might, I can not make head nor tail of what you're talking about. Fine Tuned Mac is a free forum-based Macintosh technical troubleshooting site. We have no marketing campaigns, and the only Google ads we've ever run have focused solely on Macintosh troubleshooting terms.

Now, I can perhaps, if I squint REALLY hard, perhaps see where you might have run off the rails, insofar as there are troubleshooting threads on the Fine Tuned Mac Web site that talk about Rosetta. However, what you may not know is that Rosetta is Apple's trade name for their proprietary real-time interpreter that permits machine code written for PowerPC processors to run on Intel-based computers. If you're unfamiliar with any of those terms, you might find a Google search enlightening.

Should you have a problem with Apple's use of the word "Rosetta," I respectfully (well, as respectfully as I can manage, anyway) suggest you take this up with Apple's intellectual property lawyers.

I trust this concludes your interest in Fine Tuned Mac.

Regards,
Franklin Veaux

Last edited by cyn; 12/02/11 11:22 AM. Reason: Moved from the Lounge to FineTunedMac Feedback.

Photo gallery, all about me, and more: www.xeromag.com/franklin.html
Re: We've been hit with a cease-and-desist order!
tacit #19442 12/02/11 04:05 AM
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They got this part right: "terms confusingly similar thereto".

From Rosetta (software):

Not to be confused with the language-learning software Rosetta Stone or the Rosetta handwriting recognition engine in the Apple Newton.

Whenever I see a Rosetta kiosk in a mall, I make it a point to notice whether there is even one customer there. So far, total customers observed by me equals zero. Someone must be buying the product, or there would be no money to pay for the automated monitoring software.


MicroMat Inc
Makers of TechTool
Re: We've been hit with a cease-and-desist order!
tacit #19443 12/02/11 05:35 AM
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Originally Posted By: tacit
Should you have a problem with Apple's use of the word "Rosetta," I respectfully (well, as respectfully as I can manage, anyway) suggest you take this up with Apple's intellectual property lawyers.

smile ...and good luck, let us know how that works out.

Re: We've been hit with a cease-and-desist order!
tacit #19446 12/02/11 08:30 AM
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Originally Posted By: tacit
To whom it may concern:

Blah, blah, blah.............

Sincerely,

BrandEnforcement@rosettastone.com
Rosetta Stone Ltd.

Originally Posted By: tacit
Appropriate response.............

Regards,
Franklin Veaux

It's hard to take the Rosetta people seriously when they neither take the time to use simple business correspondence courtesy and find out who they're contacting nor provide a name of someone to whom you can respond.

Bouncing it in Apple's direction should give them pause.

Last edited by ryck; 12/02/11 08:31 AM.

ryck

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Re: We've been hit with a cease-and-desist order!
ryck #19447 12/02/11 10:28 AM
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Re MMT3: My sister bought Rosetta to (re)learn Spanish. Not so much.

RE tacit: It's a good story, and I like your reply. Mine, however, would have been zilch. I wouldn't reply to any legalistic piece of crap like that unless and until it was sent and delivered by certified mail from a legitimate law firm, preferably with a court order attached. It ain't worth the time and effort ... although I agree that responding as you did is quite cathartic at times. Carry on.


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