A trademark dispute with the counsel for a non-free cd-burning program for the Macintosh(R) platform has arisen. According to the USPTO databases, the relevant trademark was registered and used in commerce since some time in 1997.

The program you see here operates on Unix(R)-like systems such as Linux, not Macintosh(R) systems. The program represented by the relevant trademark does not operate on Unix(R)-like systems.

The program you see here is free software, available to the public without cost from unlimited sources around the world. Nobody ever offered for sale a license to use the program. Nobody ever intended to offer for sale a license to use the program. In fact, all persons have always been prohibited from trading in the right to use the program not found here.

Access to the program not found here constitutes a basic human right. You can't give it to someone. You can't take it away. It is not a commodity. That's the way it was built and deployed.

The program you see here is not actually capable of burning CDs by itself. It requires a littany of supporting programs from a variety of sources to accomplish said task. Said supporting programs are also free software by the same description.

Registering or using a trademark gives you certain specific legal rights and responsibilities. One of the responsibilities is to defend your trademark against something called "dilution". Mostly, you do this by threat of litigation. That's exactly what the other party has done.

The other party to this dispute has not yet asked for the program to be taken away from the public. They have asked for a change of name. Until the parties to this dispute have resolved their differences, this web site has a fairly good chance to remain offline. As for what the resolution will be, what will happen afterwards, or how long that will take, we'll just have to wait and see.