Open Letter to Our Readers: Letter from Leonardo’s Executive Editor

OPEN LETTER TO OUR READERS Letter from Leonardo’s Executive Editor 9 April 2000 Dear Colleagues and Friends, As you may know, in November 1999 our Association Leonardo was served with a million-dollar lawsuit by a company called Transasia, claiming that we are infringing a trademark they obtained in France on the use of the words Leonardo, Leonardo Partners, Leonardo Finance and Leonardo Experts. They want us to stop using the word “Leonardo” in all our projects and publications. This in spite of the fact that we have been publishing and carrying out Leonardo projects since 1968 with full international copyright registration. It never occurred to us that the word Leonardo, the first name of Leonardo da Vinci, could be owned by anyone. It still strikes us as an amazing arrogance that anyone could want to keep cultural groups around the world from using this word without the permission of a venture capital business in France. It would be as though Amazon.com decided that all environmental groups would have to start getting their permission before using the word “Amazon” in their projects to protect the Amazon, or the makers of Picasso perfume or cars decided that you could not use the name “Pablo” without their permission. But maybe we should not give them ideas. With your help we have been fighting back and we want to take this opportunity to thank you for your support and ask you to keep helping. Unfortunately, the fight is just beginning, and it has implications not only for Leonardo, but for establishing the ground rules for the protection of ideas and inventions in the new situation brought about by the Internet. Let me summarize progress so far: 1. LEGAL TEAM We have assembled an excellent legal team. Our lawyers in France are Maitre Joceline Granger and Sam Okoshken. In the U.S.A. William Strong is handling our trademark suits, and Curtis Karnow, a member of the Leonardo/ISAST Board of Directors, is on hand. We have also started a small, private list of lawyers and other persons interested in details of the legal problem . If you are interested in being added to this Leonardo legal list, please send email to . 2. LEGAL RESPONSE In late March 2000 Maitre Joceline Granger filed our legal response to Transasia. The court in Nanterre has a large backlog of cases and we expect a first court hearing in the fall or at the end of the year. We have clearly documented our priority for use of the word Leonardo since 1968, continuous copyright registration, and our founding of the Association Leonardo before their association with the same name. We are prepared to fight this all the way in France or in any other country. 3. PUBLICITY Thanks to your help, the word has been broadly disseminated about the Leonardo lawsuit. Over 40 articles have appeared in the international press. A TV crew has started filming a documentary that will cover the etoy case, our Leonardo case and others. You can find a list of the articles on the legal defense pages at . If you know of articles that have appeared that are not listed, please send the URL to . We must keep waging the publicity battle. This is important not only for our lawsuit, but also to help build an international understanding that a ruthless attack on an art group—even though that group does not even compete with a business venture of the same name—threatens all organizations of this kind. We are very keen to work with journalists and other organizations to get the word out in as many different F I G H T S B A C K L E O N A R D O© 2000 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 317–319, 2000 317 318 Letter from the Editor F I G H T S B A C K L E O N A R D O languages as possible. If you know of journalists or organizations that can create Leonardo Defense Pages in other languages please contact us at . Here is a partial list of web sites and articles where you can find information about the...