freemule.net announced that they have successfully negotiated an out-of-court agreement with Firstway Medien GmbH; the company which took eMule's trademark and sent cease and desist letters to emule.de . Firstway has now agreed to immediately transfer the eMule trademark back to the rightful eMule developers at emule-project.net.
As the agreement did not have to be put through an expensive court, only a small portion of the donations made to freemule.net were used to pay their lawyer. Each donor who donated by PayPal will receive an E-mail asking what should be done with their donation. This also includes the option to get a refund.
Getting this far was not a smooth ride either as the eMule developers had received another threat, a second 'cease and desist letter' as well as DoS attacks on their servers over the past two weeks. The DoS attacks were made from the unofficial
modified version of eMule advertised as eselfilme on February 17th.
eranros submitted the following news via our news submit :
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Today we were able to negotiate an out-of-court agreement with Firstway Medien GmbH, which avoids an long and expensive lawsuit. Firstway agrees to transfer the trademark ´eMule´ to the eMule Developers (emule-project.net) immediately. They also stated that they had no knowledge of the DDoS Attack against our server and will help to reduce the damage as much as possible. With that we have reached our aim and no eMule developer or webmaster in germany has to fear legal attacks based on the trademark law anymore. We want to thank everyone who has helped us to reach this aim and in particular our attorney Dr. Martin Bahr for the night shifts.
Even if we reached primary aim, there are still some legal "battles" ongoing. Gravenreuth deceided to file a lawsuit against the owner of this website, because of offenses which were posted as comments. However since his argumentation is based on wrong facts, we are confident to win those cases without too much trouble. Read about their recent threats and received letters here. |
Open source developers put a lot of hard work into projects using their spare time and it is really horrible to experience what it is like for others to illegally sell their work for profit or in this case try taking over the project's trademark also. While this case went well as an out-of-court agreement, developers should not have to rely on using the law to keep fraudsters away from their work.
eranros wrote: They collected over 20,000 euro and they are going to give it back! Amazing.
Source: freemule.net - News
