Are the words " Word,Excel,PowerPoint" are proprietary
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Though of course, there is nothing stopping you from renaming them on your own computer for yourself. They are only going to start getting annoyed (or even know) if you start distributing the renamed things.
[snip]
Are the words " Word,Excel,PowerPoint" proprietary
of Microsoft.
Can I use them.
[/snip]
Well, you just did, so I suppose you can.
Since you probably meant "May I use them?," see the previous post for rule regarding trademarks. Basically, you may use a trademark if you label it as as such, and identify the owner.
"Word" is actually too generic for Microsoft to protect, just as Windows is. Heck, if it were an issue I'm sure that Wordstar and Wordperfect would have reamed Microsoft back when those companies were dominant.
Microsoft hasn't been able to protect "Windows" by itself - only in combination with the word "Microsoft" so I don't think that releasing a "Word" product would be much of an issue.
"Word" is actually too generic for Microsoft to protect, just as Windows is. Heck, if it were an issue I'm sure that Wordstar and Wordperfect would have reamed Microsoft back when those companies were dominant.
Microsoft hasn't been able to protect "Windows" by itself - only in combination with the word "Microsoft" so I don't think that releasing a "Word" product would be much of an issue.
agree, now programs like Excel or Outlook, or what not, that might be a different story, but for Word I would see no problem with that.
I have even seen a GUI that used OO as its office suite, but to not confuse newbie computer users, let alone new to linux, the school used all of the MS icons for Word, Excel, Outlook, etc...
had a very nice GUI IIRC. it had the school medallion, for lack of a better term, in the center with the school colors as the background with the IE logo, and all of the office logos from MS Office.
it was a small private university so if they can do it, i suppose you can to for your personal desktop.
As mentioned above, unless you start marketing the icons and names as your own, you should not get in much dutch with MS.
FWIW, it's easy for Microsoft to protect their icons (they're both trademarked and copyrighted) via both copyright and trademark law, so in a university setting or any other setting where public may have access I would avoid using Microsoft Office icons for the applications. That's a lawsuit waiting to happen, and Microsoft would be perfectly justified in protecting their logos.
Microsoft hasn't been able to protect "Windows" by itself - only in combination with the word "Microsoft" so I don't think that releasing a "Word" product would be much of an issue.
Hmm. It seems they were able to bully Lindows away from using a variation of the word "windows" as applied to an OS.. forced them to change it to Linspire.
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