“Bob Young may well have been joking yesterday when he offered his oddball solution to a trademark dispute between Apple Computer Inc. and a tech retailer, fighting each other over the name of a new operating system. But all jests aside, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats owner says this legal battle raises a serious IT issue.

Young offered to license the word “tiger” to Apple for free, as a way for the Mac maker to end a lawsuit from TigerDirect Inc., a computer retailer. Perhaps if Apple could license “tiger”, the firm would sidestep TigerDirect’s complaint that Apple’s new operating system, “Tiger”, infringes TigerDirect’s trademark.

Young argues that if anyone should possess the word “tiger”, it’s the Tiger-Cats, the Canadian Football League (CFL) team that Young owns; it plays out of his home town, Hamilton, Ont. The club has had the word “tiger” in its title for more than a century.

“That TigerDirect should try and get exclusive rights to the word ‘tiger’ when the Hamilton Tiger-Cats don’t have exclusive right to the word ‘tiger’ despite our 136-year history, it’s absurd,” said Young, former chairman of Linux distributor Red Hat Inc. and current CEO of Lulu Inc., which offers book-publishing tools.”

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