Where do I begin?

[Tony Kimball]

Quoth John D. Gwinner on Mon, 9 March:
: > In order to
: >maintain proprietary rights of trademark, one must defend the
: >trademark against dilution.
: 
: And what about Copyright?
: 
: What I'm saying is that you have to enforce intellectual property rights, or
: they are nothing.  

You are conflating all types of intellectual property into one ball of
confusion, whereas their characteristics under law are quite distinct.
Trademark rights are different from copyrights are different from the
broad terms of property rights, are different from the more specific
terms of trade secrets, are different from patents.  To attempt to
reason about these issues as though they were interchangable concepts
is to invite costly error.

: the issue I was attempting to point out is that Sun *has* to protect
: it's copyright (and other intellectual property), thus they are forced to go
: after Kaffe to enforce the copyright.  

Firstly, they are not forced to do so in order to protect copyright.
Secondly, they have a significant disincentive to do so as Kaffe is
*not* *violating* *any* *copyrights*.

: If Sun let's Kaffe get away with incorporating parts of the Sun JVM into
: it's source, then that opens the door to other JVM's to incorporate Kaffe
: source.  Therefore, Sun must go after Kaffe to protect it's rights; it's
: best not to give Sun the chance to do this.

I find this statement appalling.  It has nothing to do with the issue
of clean-room requirements.  You are talking about a hypothetical
world in which Sun's copyright has been violated.  I am talking about
the case in which Sun's copyright is not violated, but clean-room
requirements have been dropped.  Two completely disjoint cases.