Xref: news7 rec.gardens.orchids:41787

I think the whole thing is silly too.. but the way the "system" is
set up, you have to defend your copyright or risk loosing it.
Although this company has gone to the extreme. Especially
not even allowing a link to their site...


Crystal

--
Nostradamus was just a bad poet with a paranoid streak.

- Penn Gillette
"Ted Byers" wrote in message
om...
Prem Subrahmanyam wrote in message
...
It has come to my attention that using the word "Orchidarium" to refer
to an orchid-growing wardian case is an infringement of the trademark
and patents of one Orchidarium(TM) company. Hence, to respect this
company's wishes after they contacted me personally, I have changed the
link for my article and expunged any mention of the verboten name.

[snip]

This also should serve as a warning for those who use this name on their
web pages, you will probably be contacted by them soon...I suggest you
take the effort to change the name to "wardian case" and remove any
links to said company (they informed me that linking to their page is
also a violation of their alleged copyright).


While I can understand your taking the action you did, to avoid a
costly legal challenge, it seems insane to me that they would even try
to take out a trademark or copyright on the word orchidarium! It is a
perfectly valid and commonly used word in the English language (at
least among orchid growers and some commercial and government
interests). If you go to google and search on it, you will find over
a thousand web pages on which it is used, including academic and
government sites. In fact, a wardian case is just a special case of
the idea of an orchidarium (as becomes obvious on studying how both
terms are used). So, getting a trademark or patent on the word
orchidarium is about as silly as doing the same with the word
greenhouse! Perhaps they picked on you because you showed how to
build something dirt cheap that does something similar to what their
products do, and they sell their products for many many hundred of
dollars to thousands of dollars. That is insanely expensive given
that their most expensive product has no intelligence built into it.
After all, you can't connect it to your computer, and have it
calculate the optimal environment from your list of plants placed in
it and a computer database containing cultivation requirements for all
cultivated plants.

To understand what I mean by intelligence being built into such a
unit, consider that when I am done, the unit I make will be able to
function as a network appliance, with a cost of materials (buying
retail) less than C$300. If I were to set up a business making these
things, I could sell an orchidarium network appliance, with a
beautiful wood and plexiglass structure, and software, for less than
what their least expensive product costs, and still make a decent
profit. The only expensive part of such a project would be to
populate the database with the optimal temperatures, humidities, and
lighting, along with acceptable ranges for each, for every cultivated
plant (not to mention animals that would appropriately maintained in
such a container). The MOST challenging part of such a project is the
programming involved, and even that is simple enough that a secondary
school student can do it (if properly motivated and guided by a good
teacher). Do a search using google on the word orchidarium, and
you'll find a page on a Welsh site where such a student has done
exactly that! And you'll see another page describing briefly the
efforts of some students, I think in the Philipines IIRC, who did
something similar!

I have visited Orchidarium's site and in my view their products are
not all that impressive and they are seriously over priced; especially
given the current exchange rate between the Canadian and US dollars I
was much more impressed with the Welsh kid's project, and especially
his vision of the possibilities. But they do appear to have a number
of other companies selling their products. And I do not understand
what they have that could be patented since I see nothing in their
products that could not easily be replaced with off-the-shelf products
I have seen at Home Depot, unless what they patented is not visible on
their website. I don't know. Maybe it is possible to get a patent
for a product that has only trivial differences from someone else's
product, or for just combining a pair of existing products to make a
new one.

What you describe just seems so annoying. While I did not see
anything on ther website that impressed me enough to consider buying
from them, what you describe suggests to me that they have more than
one person either working for them or in their management, who
practices being a PITA (think acronym), or they have a lawyer who uses
this nonsense as a scam to get more billable hours out of them, and so
under no circumstances would I consider doing business with them. It
doesn't really matter why they treated you as they did. What matters
is that how they treated you guarantees I won't be dealing with them.
I guess they didn't consider that how they behave is bound to have an
effect on how people perceive them which in turn affects whether or
not people will do business with them.

It is good, though, thay you are keeping your page about your
orchidarium available since it is an excellent and valuable document.
A "must read" for anyone who has to consider making such a thing for
themselves.

Cheers,

Ted