Possible Spam : Re: Renewal of STAR File trademark registration

[kaduk at polycrystallography.com]

HI, Brian:

How much money are we talking about?

Jim Kaduk

On 2020-07-08 05:17, Brian McMahon via comcifs wrote:
> Dear All
> 
> The IUCr Executive Secretary has received a renewal notice for
> the registered trademark "STAR File" that expires at the end of
> the year. There is a cost involved and the Executive Secretary
> has queried whether we still want to protect this trademark.
> 
> The trademark was registered in 2001 with the UK Intellectual
> Property Office as an outcome of the COMCIFS discussions in
> 2000 that led to the policy statement on the CIF website
> https://www.iucr.org/resources/cif/comcifs/policy
> 
> That statement includes the following paragraph:
> 
>      Protection of the standards
>      To protect the STAR File and the CIF as standards for 
> interchanging
>      and archiving electronic data, the IUCr, on behalf of the
>      scientific community,
> 
>        * holds the copyrights on the standards themselves,
>        * owns the associated trademarks and service marks, and
>        * holds a patent on the STAR File.
> 
>      These intellectual property rights relate solely to the 
> interchange
>      formats, not to the data contained therein, nor to the software
>      used in the generation, access or manipulation of the data.
> 
> Note that the STAR File patent has now expired in the sole jurisdiction
> where it was filed (the UK), so the statement should now be revised at
> least to reflect that fact.
> 
> So far as we can ascertain, the only active trademark registration is
> that for "STAR File", but I shall can the Executive Secretary to review
> paper files for 2001 when he returns to the office. According to my
> notes, "STAR File" was used as a test case but ran into some
> measure of difficult as predicted by Nick Spadaccini in
> https://www.iucr.org/__data/iucr/lists/comcifs-l/msg00055.html
> 
> Obviously the difficulties were overcome in this case, but I
> don't know if the then Executive Secretary pursued other registration
> attempts (e.g. for "CIF").
> 
> I invite comment.
> 
> Regards
> Brian
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