[schuppentier]

This feels like they want to use trademark law to prevent third-party products. You can't legally produce the screws without baiscally copying the BMW logo onto it. I don't know if a similar argument would hold water for the drivers though.

[tialaramex]

IIRC in Europe at least that doesn't work because now your third party has the defence of necessity. They didn't want to use your protected mark, but it was necessary or else their product wouldn't work, so, the protection doesn't apply.

[bitwize]

In the USA, in Sega v. Accolade the judge ruled that you can't use a trademark to block access to your stuff. The context was, the Sega Genesis DRM had a check for the string "SEGA" somewhere in the game's ROM; presumably, Sega reasoned that they could license their trademarked name for this purpose to licensed devs and sue makers of unlicensed cartridges for trademark infringement; and did sue Accolade when they attempted to publish unlicensed games for copyright and trademark infringement. The appeals judge overturned an earlier decision in favor of Sega, citing that trademarks can't be used to block what would otherwise be a fair-use act.

Much of Sega v. Accolade was overruled by the DMCA, which explicitly makes defeating DRM a crime in the general case. But the prohibition against using trademarks to gatekeep people performing legal, nonfraudulent activity probably remains and may be cited in future cases.

[plagiarist]

That ruling sounds so sane and now we have DMCA bullshit.

You used to be able to take spammers to court individually as well, now we have the fuckall federal enforcement that protects them more than it does us.

[jacquesm]

On the contrary, they are asking for trademark dilution with this.

[publicmail]

This is also why a lot of car bumpers have the make/model/logo impressed into the mold itself