We have successfully defended our Trademark and Copyright against eCommerce Ventures Ltd who blatantly registered “osCommerce” as a trademark in the United Kingdom and tried to “pass off” as being osCommerce.
With owning the trademark registration, the firm, comprised of members that were active and are known to many on our community support forums, contacted a number of our former team members, Corporate Sponsors, and community members and gave a deadline of 4 days to respond to handing over domains, ceasing any business relationships with us, and to replace links pointing to our website with theirs.
With the help of the Free Software Foundation Europe / Freedom Task Force of seeking legal aid in the United Kingdom, we appointed Beck Greener as our legal counsel and started legal proceedings against the firm.
As this not only affected our community of store owners and developers but also how Open Source projects and solutions operate, we decided to be open on this issue and to keep the community informed of every step we were taking.
Before our legal counsel could send the first letter, the firm had informally sent us a proposal to quickly resolve the issue of agreeing to let them continue owning the trademark registration and assured its use for SEO purposes only.
As we could obviously not agree to those terms, our legal counsel formerly replied with our demands that were successfully used as a base to later settle out of court.
This included ceasing usage of the osCommerce name, ceasing further distribution of their software and add-ons infringing on our copyright, and to surrender the trademark they had registered.
The support given by the community during this course was truly amazing. We’d like to thank everyone here and in international communities for their support and are immensely proud to have such a caring community! Thank you for being part of it!
We’re kickstarting our public meetings again with a meet-up in London on Friday 11th December 2009 at the Match Bar West End (Oxford Circus) from 5pm onwards. This will be a casual no-presentation meet-up to meet, mingle, and have a few drinks with store owners, developers, and enthusiasts part of our community located in and around London.