"Transport Tycoon" trademark

[Moriarty]

Hi Guys.
Over in the OTTD forums someone suggested renaming OpenTTD and during the discussion several folks stated Transport Tycoon is a trademark. Being the skeptical type I am, I investigated and it turns out that it's generally not a registered trademark at all in most English speaking countries or EU-wide, with the US being the exception.

I've created a simple wiki-page of my findings - http://wiki.openttd.org/Trademark_status - and was hoping others could investigate in their own languages the status of the "transport tycoon" trademark and update the page with the results.

I would suggest just searching for the term "tycoon", there aren't many results for it anywhere that I've seen so it's easy enough to manually go through them all to look for derivatives too.
Thanks

[PikkaBird]

Firstly, a trade mark doesn't need to be registered to exist.

Secondly, why? There's nothing but possible legal issues and a whole bucket of ill will to be had here.

[Moriarty]

Firstly, a trade mark doesn't need to be registered to exist.

Secondly, why? There's nothing but possible legal issues and a whole bucket of ill will to be had here.

Yes, you're right, you don't need it to be registered, but that is dependent on jurisdiction (read: country). I'm not a lawyer, nor do I plan on reading up on every single trademark law in every country that TT has ever been sold in. So I'm taking the simple option - registered trademarks.
Though I suspect the fact that the trademark hasn't been used, even unregistered, for many years probably means it's not much use as an unregistered trademark (wikipedia implies this for some places).

Secondly - because I'm trying to conclusively discover the trademark status of the term as a registered trademark. Or should we just bury our heads in the sand and remain ignorant?
And why would there be ill will?

[PikkaBird]

because I'm trying to conclusively discover the trademark status of the term as a registered trademark.

Yes, but why? And more to the point, why are you doing it on this forum and the OpenTTD wiki?

And why would there be ill will?

Did you actually read the thread you spun this off from?

The fact is that someone out there owns Transport Tycoon, and whoever it is could - whether they ultimately have a valid case or not - make life very difficult for OpenTTD. So it doesn't matter whether you decide the name isn't trademarked, the name of OpenTTD isn't changing to "Transport Tycoon", or anything along those lines, and the links between Transport Tycoon and OpenTTD are going to continue to be broken wherever possible. No matter how sound asleep the bear appears to be, we really don't appreciate people going up and giving it a kick.

[teccuk]

There's an old saying...

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie.