Tuesday, November 10, 2009

THE OTHER SHOE DROPS!


INTEL CORPORATION SUES OUR COMPANY!


ON OCTOBER 23, 2009, INTEL CORPORATION FILED SUIT IN FEDERAL AND STATE COURTS AGAINST OUR COMPANY, AMERICAS NEWS INTEL PUBLISHING LLC


In July 2007, Intel Corporation's counsel served us with a cease and desist notice regarding the use of 'intel' in our URL, latinintel.com. Intel, they argued, was a trademark they owned, not a common English-language abbreviation for intelligence in the sense of information gathering and analysis. (Precisely the activity that our company engages in.)


We were advised that Intel Corporation wanted, above all, to protect the brand value that comes with its "famous mark."


Famous? How about infamous?



Intel Corporation has been sued by governments in Asia, Europe, and the US for industrial malfeasance. Japan and South Korea have acted against the company for offering money to suppliers in order to squeeze competitors from the market, while earlier this year European regulators fined the company €1bn for making anti-competitive payments to computer manufacturers -- a record-setting penalty, and by far. Now a new case has been brought against it by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. The State of New York is charging the company had used "bribery" and "coercion" to "maintain a stranglehold" on the market.


Regardless of the numerous scandals in which it is embroiled, Intel Corporation contends that any mention of 'intel' should be controlled by and respond to its own corporate interests.


To the cease and desist order, we obviously responded that intel is a widely accepted abbreviation for “intelligence” in the sense of information gathering and analysis. In fact, we had a linguist research this etymology, and found evidence of the use of this word in this sense dating back to at least the 1950s. Intel Corporation was formed in 1968.


Upon our response, the campaign of legal attrition and harassment began.


We endured countless emails and phone calls, conference appointments that were canceled or simply ignored, and long periods of inexplicable silence from a series of three lawyers at Intel Corporation's external counsel. Eventually, the case ended up in the hands of Intel Corporation's internal lawyers, and we waded through more fruitless communications and vexations. On October 23 of this year, yet another lawyer from yet another external law firm formally filed suit against us in state and federal court venues in the US.


From the beginning, we recognized that our business asset, the use of the word intel in our URL, could have brand value to Intel Corporation, and out of sensitivity to that recognition, we offered to sell it to them for a very modest price (when everyone around us was urging us to pitch for millions). We based our valuation on strictly technical costs of migration and a small brand equity we believe to have constructed in our LatinIntel identity. We used accepted accounting methods to calculate our brand equity. And from the very beginning and up until the present moment, Intel Corporation and their counsel maintained that intel was their exclusive property, and not our asset to sell. This gulf was never even remotely bridged during the past two-plus years. In fact, roughly a year ago we demanded that they discontinue their campaign of legal harassment and cease the emails and phone calls. In their capricious manner, when we issued this demand, one of their lawyers promptly called us up on the phone.


This is a copy of the first communication we received from Intel's legal representation in July 2009:


http://www.latinintel.com/Intel_Infringement_Letter.pdf


This is a copy of our company's response to that communication (with the law firm and lawyer's names blocked out because they no longer represent us):


http://www.latinintel.com/Intel/Intel_Infringement_Letter_Response.pdf


This is a copy of Intel's legal representation most recent communication with as of November 3, 2009:


http://www.latinintel.com/Intel/Final_Intel_Communication.pdf


This is a copy of our final communication with Intel Corporation and its counsel, dated November 6, 2009:


http://www.latinintel.com/Final_Email.pdf


We lack funds to hire legal counsel -- something that Intel Corporation, with one of the largest litigation war chests on the planet, is undoubtedly banking on. But this sort of corporate abuse cannot continue unabated. It's easy to imagine the slippery slope we will all be upon if we allow common English-language words in the public domain to become private property of large abusive corporations.

5 comments:

DONATION POLICY said...

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/

Daily Intel -- and it's not about tech hardware manufacturing!

DONATION POLICY said...

With Sewell's switch, will we all be sued for eating delicious apples -- the tree fruit?

"With Intel’s longstanding legal dispute with AMD (AMD) resolved, Douglas Melamed the company’s new general counsel, will have one less thing to worry about when he starts work–not that he lacks the experience to deal with it. Melamed served as acting assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, where he worked from 1996 to 2001. He replaces longtime Intel (INTC) GC Bruce Sewell, who left the company to become general counsel of Apple (AAPL) back in September."

http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20091113/intel-hires-antitrust-expert-as-general-counsel/

DONATION POLICY said...

"Envidia" in Spanish means coveting, jealousness. Who wouldn't be spiteful of a competitor that crushes opponents with unfair tactics. Just ask us!

Nvidia has joined Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in complaining loudly about the tactics Intel uses to sell its products, especially the strong-arm bundling of video chips with CPUs.

Intel dominates the PC CPU market, which is the area in which AMD has been disputing the marketing tactics used by Intel for years. AMD’s complaints were resolved recently in a $1.25 billion settlement with Intel, primarily based on the bundling tactics Intel allegedly uses in selling its products. These are essentially the same tactics about which Nvidia is upset, though in their case it is the bundling of Intel’s video processors along with its CPUs that are at issue.

http://www.chipchick.com/2009/11/intel-amd-settlement.html

DONATION POLICY said...

"The first thing that the two parties have agreed on is that Intel won't engage in the sorts of anticompetitive practices that were outlined in AMD's suit and in the NYC Attorney General's suit of the week before. The lawsuits and Friday's settlement go into specifics of the different types of proscribed behavior, but they all boil down to accusations of Intel strong-arming OEMs and ODMs into either not using AMD CPUs in their systems, or into severely handicapping their AMD-based products by launching them late or placing hard limits on the number of them that are shipped."

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/11/now-that-amd-and-intel-have-settled-the-fight-really-begins.ars

Anonymous said...

Many website's use the word INTEL, I will look forward and research some examples to put them here. I totally support this cause. Best wishes for all the team in Americas News INTEL Publishing! & latinintel.com

Regards,

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