Fluke Donates Multimeters To SparkFun As Goodwill Gesture 250
Actually, I do RTFA writes "We recently heard about the confiscation of a delivery of multimeters to SparkFun for infringing on Fluke's trademark. One common thread in the discussions was the theme that Fluke should have let that shipment through as a goodwill gesture to SparkFun and the Maker community. Well, Fluke did one better. They announced they were sending more than $30k worth of official multimeters to SparkFun for them to do whatever they want with. SparkFun is most likely going to give them away. A great example of win-win-win?"
Good PR Move (Score:5, Insightful)
Fluke moves from villain to hero.
$30K is cheap for good PR.
Re:Win Win Win Except... (Score:3, Insightful)
Their trademark, which is for "multimeter with yellow border", which they essentially stole from over 20 years of common publicly-available usage during which Fluke's own multimeters were typically grey?
Re:Kind of an empty gesture (Score:5, Insightful)
As the article notes, SparkFun isn't about to try to resell these guys, so SparkFun is still out their entire shipment. What would have been a lot more meaningful of Fluke to do would be to cancel the trademark. That being said, I love Fluke multimeters. Five years of physics labs really made me believe their unofficial motto, "If it works, it's a Fluke."
Why should they cancel their trademark? In what world is that even remotely the right thing to do here?
The slashdot community is hilarious sometimes.
Re:Good PR Move (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Sparkfun is out either way from what I understand. They're planning on giving the Fluke ones away to educational institutions, but they seem much happier about this than just flat out losing the $30k worth of meters.
Re:Kind of an empty gesture (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the way it works around here:
If I produce software, I want to get paid for it. If someone else produces software, I'll steal it.
When I make a product, no one else can make anything like it. When someone else makes a product like someone else, they're free to rip off the design because you can't copyright or trademark that shit.
Re:$30K = 2K Sparkfun Multis = 100 Fluke Multis (Score:5, Insightful)
Trademarking a color combination and JUST that it's BS.
It is bullshit to say this is only about the color combination. The knockoff ones look exactly like Fluke devices, and it is hardly accidental. Your argument makes it seem that some good faith is involved on the part of the manufacturer of the fake Fluke meters, and that the violation is trivial, but that is simply not the case.
Re:Good PR Move (Score:4, Insightful)
Still. No way Fluke should have been given that trademark. This isn't a "mark" it is the design of the product itself.
That is another damning example of a big enough company being able to buy off the right lawyers to say some abusive use of the law is legally okay. A design patent might have been appropriate in this case, but those expire in 15 years and how long have they been selling two toned multi-meters? If it is more than 15 years then Sparkfun should have every right to sell something that looks similar.
Clearly they went for a trademark rather than the appropriate design patent so it wouldn't expire. But a trade mark is supposed to be exactly that: A word or mark on a product or marketing material that indicates the company or brand that is selling it. Like a Nike swoosh or the Apple with a bite out of it or even a word mark like IBM. It would be like Nike trying to trademark a two toned sneaker or Ford trying to trademark a black muscle car with a yellow stripe rather than just the swoosh or the word "Ford" in an oval.
Just because we can say that the government is at fault for awarding this trademark in the first place, doesn't mean we can absolve the company of an abuse of intellectual property law.
Yes, they got some bad press and figured it would effect their business, but I don't think they have made this right until they cancel or abandon this trademark altogether
Re:Good PR Move (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Sparkfun is out either way from what I understand. They're planning on giving the Fluke ones away...
Sparkfun is out only because they CHOOSE to give stuff away. Don't cry for them, they're being made whole by the generosity of a large evil corporation, or at least that was the opinion most people had of Fluke yesterday. It's Fluke who is out either way. Either Fluke becomes this evil company that is simply trying to keep its trademark and a few people stop buying from them, or they hand out $30k and the same people who would buy from them anyway keep buying from them.
And Fluke is out for support, too. Those people who get free Fluke meters from Sparcfun aren't going to call Sparcfun when they need help with the meter. They're going to call Fluke because Fluke's name is on them.
I think that's a pretty sweet deal for Sparcfun. They violated a trademark and they're not suffering one bit from it. The company whose trademark they infringed is the one losing money.
They didn't, but did, but didn't... (Score:3, Insightful)
They didn't.. insofar as Fluke reps standing at ports waiting for a multimeter to pass by their eyes and go "Whoa, Nelly!" - or even getting a call in advance telling them that a shipment of DMMs was found that may or may not infringe.
They did... insofar as Fluke having registered for the trade dress in the first place.
They didn't... insofar as cheap knockoffs trying to copy Fluke's looks - regardless of intent there, Fluke rather they didn't - and since asking nicely tends not to work, trade dress it is.
A lot of people seem to have missed the issue in the original story anyway (even if it may have come across as an attack against Fluke based on e.g. the title).
SparkFun doesn't really mind Fluke's trade dress (other than believing it to be overly broad - they themselves deem the old SFE DMM's border to be more of an orange..). What they mind is the inflexibility of the system once you're confronted with such an issue. For example, SFE didn't appear to have any way to tell CBP that they believed the borders to be orange and thus not even run afoul of the trade dress to begin with and enter e.g. arbitration with either the CBP or with Fluke. There's also the matter of how the product gets destroyed, with only a quoted price per hour - but no indication of how long it would take. Responsible destruction would take a very long time, a shredder should take less than 30 minutes; either could easily be possible for the price cited. Then there's the whole option of 'either ship them away or have them destroyed' in the first place; No "you can store them here and adjust the product so it no longer infringes", and even if you could adjust them, the period in which you have to make that decision is rather short.
While it's easy enough to say that SFE should have done better in figuring out this could occur beforehand, that doesn't help once the issue does arise.
Some will shrug that off and say "well I guess if you have to learn the hard way...", others will contemplate the bureaucracy.
Note that this is pretty much a separate issue from whether or not the color combo should be something that you can get a trade mark/dress on in the first place, which most people focused on (next to the "if you copy a popular brand, you oughtta know this can happen" discussion).
Re:Kind of an empty gesture (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good PR Move (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that's a pretty sweet deal for Sparcfun. They violated a trademark and they're not suffering one bit from it. The company whose trademark they infringed is the one losing money.
...but Fluke apparently considers it worth the cost to be the good guy.
Re:Good PR Move (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think that Sparkfun was intentionally trying to get fluke lookalike DMMs, and I'm very sure that Fluke agrees with me. Yeah, Fluke got put in a rough spot by this mess, but nobody was malicious. So Fluke spends a bit of their advertising budget to buy their way out. They benefit because they keep their trademark and they get their products into the hands of tomorrow's engineers, technicians and hobbyists. Sparkfun gets to make a great big gesture about IP law and an actual choice about donating equipment (which they do pretty often anyways - this won't kill them). This is what we call 'win win.'
Since they're donating the DMMs, technically both companies are losing about 30K. Given their respective sizes, Sparkfun is making the larger sacrifice, I think.
Re:How is this a good thing for SparkFun? (Score:5, Insightful)
SparkFun is in the business of selling DIY electronics. They're more like a modern Heath.
They're out the original shipment, but Fluke stepped in with an absolutely unnecessary act of goodwill. Now SparkFun's broken even, because they still have multimeters to sell to make their business, and the customers that would have bought the original ones still want multimeters, and now SparkFun has the Fluke brand, to boot...
But this is no longer in the hands of the inventory people. This is marketing. Sure, SparkFun could probably sell the multimeters at a very nice profit, but that's not their business. They're selling electronics in general, so they thrive on the repeat business rather than one-time equipment sales. Giving away these multimeters to loyal customers is a nice way to build their own brand loyalty.
Fluke looks like the good guy. SparkFun gets cheap viral marketing. Everybody's walking away happy.
Re:They didn't, but did, but didn't... (Score:5, Insightful)
They did... insofar as Fluke having registered for the trade dress in the first place.
People really need to stop blaming companies for participating in the current P&T system that we have. Until you enter "troll" territory (starting legal fights over clearly dubious P&Ts), registering trademarks and patents is just good business sense.
Want to make a change, stop blaming Fluke or whoever and push for patent / trademark reform.
Re:Kind of an empty gesture (Score:5, Insightful)
You forgot the part where it is appropriate to go to a grocery store, determine for yourself how much the goods on the shelves should cost, and leave that dollar amount on the shelf in lieu of paying what the grocer is asking.
But those bastards better not abuse the licensing terms on my software.
Re:Good PR Move (Score:5, Insightful)
Calling support for a multimeter? What planet are you from? Short of it breaking and needing a replacement under warranty, you plug it in, spin the dial to the mode you want, and away you go.
And when it breaks, or behaves in a way you don't expect, are you going to call Sparkfun or Fluke? Fluke, of course.
Do people call Sears for tech support on a Craftsman wrench? I'll grant a multimeter is *slightly* more complicated of a tool,
A good quality multimeter is a LOT more complicated a tool than a wrench.
but really only slightly to someone who's the least bit experienced in that area of tech.
You expect your multimeter to be as reliable as a wrench, but that doesn't mean it is as simple as a wrench inside. Especially if those meters are being given out to DIY/school users. "Why doesn't my meter read Amps anymore? What do you mean there's a fuse? Where is the fuse? How do I replace it?"
I have a Keithley that reads negative voltage. That means if I test a nine volt battery, the display reads negative nine with the red lead on positive. Such a simple device, huh? How could it possibly fail in that mode? It took looking at the schematic, but sure enough, there's an inverting buffer that isn't anymore. That's in a device you think is almost as simple as a wrench.
I think I got my first MM when I was six years old. Took Dad about 10 minutes to show me how to measure voltage and resistance, and that was when you had to set the range yourself.
And as a six year old did you really learn not to try measuring the resistance of the mains? Or did you learn that by blowing up a meter? Even if your Dad told you not to, you never forgot and did it anyway? Sure. Or you never tried to see how many amps the mains could provide and blew the fuse? Or even just over-amped from an unexpected measurement and done the same?
I've had so many cheap crap multimeters die that I've lost count. I've also bought used meters by the box because they were all "failed", and some of them were really just a blown fuse, or some a bad battery lead. But they were ALL discarded and new ones put in their place because of those simple problems, by people who were using them to teach electronics. They didn't know how to fix their own meters, and I don't expect the recipients of the donations from Fluke will know, either.