Arm's lawyers want to check assembly expert's book for trademark missteps Reverse-engineering expert Maria Markstedter, whose domain names were wrestled from her by Arm the other week for trademark reasons, has said the British processor design biz's lawyers are now reviewing her Arm assembly language book for any trademark violations – and may make her issue a reprint. At the end of August, …
No decisions are these days. All the management has been consolidated on the US side and live in their own San Jose bubble. VP levels and up are all sqeaky clean MBAs these days without a clue about technology but fully brimmed with buzzwords. There's a running joke/competition in the Cambridge office to make up buzzwords and terms in meetings and see how far they travel into the upper layers of management.
I am not a trademark expert and haven't seen the book, but aren't the references within it going to be covered by "nominative fair use*"?
If so, I really don't get what they are trying to do+, especially if the trademark is acknowledged in the front-matter.
* where the trademark is used to identify "the product" - in this case "arm assembler".
+ I mustn't forget that lawyers are involved, which introduces a reality distortion field.
Like you, I have not read the book in question - but pretty much any technical book I have read in the last fifty years includes phrasing early in the introduction or colophon similar to 'trademarks are the property of their respective owners'.
Yes, a company has to defend its trademarks and branding, but when you're defending, better I think that the guns should be pointing outwards and not at your own feet...
If taken to court, the author would very likely win the case - but lose an enormous amount of money in the defense.
Maybe a better move would be to comply with the trademark changes, but insert a new Chapter 1: Consider Using a Different Platform, As These Folks Will Sue You.
Make it 20 years, then I'll be comfortably retired and no longer caring as to which type of core sits at the heart of any of the microcontrollers on the market at that point. Until then, I'd very much like for those cores to continue being based around the technology developed by the company easily confused for an upper body appendage, because whatever we might thing about the company at a corporate level, their engineering is still pretty damned good, and I do rather enjoy working with the fruits of their labours...
If it were me, and my life of support and faithfulness was being upended like that, I would start every public speaker event by saying something along the line of :
"Let me be perfectly clear : we are talking about Arm, which is a trademark of Arm, not Leg. And it's those fuckers over there that are watching me right now, that want me to say that Arm is a trademark of those fuckers. Just to be clear. Thank you."
They should go after the people with this domain...
obviously cybersquatting: https://www.armandhammer.com/
and let us not forget the (not leggy people.. but) army.com
probably don't want to go to war with the latter......
Way to really piss off the community... Which legal clown overruled the marketing people?
This truly adds insult to injury. It also makes me wonder: how will ARM minions go to universities giving presentations and trying to coerce people to join their ranks now? I mean they should really expect an influx of nasty remarks and questions everywhere, at least that's what I'd do.
After getting up to my elbows in the abohorence of the structure of the ARM64 binary ISA compared to the 32-bit ISA, Arm seem to be determined to self-destruct. They seem to have dug out an 1990s i86 opcode manual and thought "hold my beer".
Edit: On a spur, I dug into my ARM64 ISA docs that I was thrashing through when coding up an ARM64 assembler. 204 PAGES! WTF? How on earth can an ISA binary encoding description be 204 pages of 1192 individual instructions? ARM32 fitted on a single page of A5. Another reference squashed it down to 58 pages, but FIFTY-EIGHT PAGES??!!!??
That misrepresents what happened. Arm didn't go after Markstedter directly, they went for the hosting company (see previous article). Said web hosting company folded under the legal letters and took down ALL her sites including ones not affected by the trademarks so she had to cede control of the ones Arm deemed to be violating their trademarks to get anything back at all.
The lack of any meaningful response from Arm is pretty appalling to be honest and very poor PR for them.
This isn't the company it was 20 years ago. It's not a gang of working friends in a rented barn in Cambridge. It's been filled with useless MBAs that couldn't get into FAANG and prostituted to the PE industry many times and has no resemblence of the innovative tech company it once was. Lawsuits, like I predicted a few years ago to negative reaction on this site are one of a few pathsconsidered as a viable way forward for the company to grow, including going full architectural license too. If you think these lawyers aren't going to start going after RISC-V in the same way if they sense their cease and desists will land anywhere near the mark you are mistaken. When you have a group of hobbyists that don't know the ins and outs of trademarks you are in for trouble.
When I saw anti-trust lawyers being hired faster than architects and engineers I knew the writing was on the wall. But maybe riscv-basics did that, I can't remember.
"What did they do if they didn't say anything? Look mean?"
Send threats to her web host until all her sites, not just the ones they were complaining about, were taken offline. That would get my attention pretty quickly too, and depending on how much I wanted to try the gambling in the courtroom game, I might decide to let them have what they want in order to get my sites up. It all depends how important those sites are to me and whether I think they're vindictive enough to go after them even if I segment them. I'd be tempted to try a stronger response to them, but I've never had to do so before and it's easier when I imagine the scathing legal (sort of, I'm not a lawyer) letter I could write than when I'm actually facing a large department of people who really do have law degrees.
Next time, read the articles, then you'd know what they did.
For goodness sake, it was a book that would encourage more people to use their product. Which would make them more money.
Did they ever notice that the publishers that clog up the computing sections of bookshops with "How to get the best out of Windows / MacOS / Android / etc" books haven't been sued by the massive tech companies that own those trademarks? Or wonder why?
This is not the original, British ARM any more. This is the new SoftBank-owned Japanese ARM. It appears to be lawyer-led. Time to walk away and find some friendlier territory.
For all its faults, we have an open source OS and software. Open source hardware would be good.
Open source hardware would be good.
Would that be the hardware that a certain company dissed using riscv-basics.com?
V.
The book is possibly the best on assembly for any CPU I have seen. A really good read. Not often you can say that about assembly books and I have read a lot.
To be so heavy handed like this to someone who has engaged with them and helps people get the best out of their product shows what morons they are now running ARM.
I think a similar book written by the same author about RISC-V would be appropriate whether or not this takedown from Softbank ever happened.
In particular, RISC-V does not require any malice towards ARM to succeed. Since Linux, GCC and LLVM have reached the level where ARM is practical in the data center, so RISC-V and even Loongson are equally practical.
In the end it's about who has the better and faster hardware. ARM is causing trouble for companies with architectural licenses to innovate, see the Qualcomm Nuvia lawsuit, while RISC-V is so easy no license is required.
People don't like bullies. If you want to see yourself lose market share to RISC V, just carry on the thuggish behaviour.
People don't forget, and perhaps even now there are embedded engineers the world around going "You know, I've been meaning to have a play with RISC V and if ARM are going to run around being arseholes perhaps now's the time to do it. If they can be this stupid in how they treat people who are trying to help them by educating about their architecture, what other boneheaded mistakes are they going to make once the IPO really goes to their heads?".
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