Please read my follow up response (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7439468). The legal environment is one specific context. I don't go around saying 'syntax error!' to anyone who misspeaks.
Your solution to this seems to be (morally) compulsory licensing instead of notifying customs authorities about the fact of an infringement. Exactly why should a firm grant a license to its direct competitor to make inferior-quality goods in the first firm's trade dress?
I could just as easily argue that the fault for the waste here lies with the Chinese exporter who refuses to take back the unwanted product which infringes on someone else's trade dress. I don't buy the argument about import taxes making it too expensive, this is what entrepots are for.
You seem to be shifting the goal posts. The discussion above is around whether trademark law requires Fluke to take the action they took today. Not whether it's morally right, wrong or what reasons there might be for it or anything else. Just the implication by the poster above that somehow Fluke was forced to do what they did by trademark law.
The truth is they are required to "protect" their trademark, but that doesn't require anything like what their actions were today. It's an almost irrelevant and highly misleading statement to throw into the discussion. Just to give an example, they could easily have arranged with SparkFun to allow the goods through but require a sticker be placed on each item identifying that it is not a Fluke product. That would also protect the trademark. If there is evidence that SparkFun is wilfully antagonistic and uncooperative then destroying products seems like a last resort you might arrive at. But before that there are a million different solutions that don't involve destroying and blocking SparkFun products open to both parties.
In this case, I do not believe that the firms are actually direct competitors. Fluke seems to somewhat agree, judging by this gesture of goodwill that they're giving Sparkfun.
We hear of plenty of similar cases where some firm sends a C&D to a barely related firm, and a common refrain is that the first firm simply must defend their trademark in such a manner, leaving no room for judgment. I am pointing out that this is patently false.
Fluke and the Chinese manufacturers of the cheap multimeters, who are the infringers in this case, most certainly are direct competitors. They are both selling multimeters, and the price differential is beside the point. Sparkfun is just a distributor, they're not engaged in trademark infringement and have just been caught in the middle. Fluke is buying itself some nice PR, but that doesn't alter the legal situation one whit.
We hear of plenty of similar cases where some firm sends a C&D to a barely related firm
As the importer and contractor of the manufacturing, Sparkfun is the responsible party. First, the manufacturer just uses whatever colors/marking/customization that Sparkfun requests (note the Sparkfun logo on the meter). Second, trademarks are de facto irrelevant in China.
I personally don't think this meter directly competes with Fluke - Sparkfun has lots of great things, but test equipment is not among them. But we can agree to disagree about this, and my point stands irrespective of it - Companies, despite being legally compelled to churn on anything remotely related to their trademark, can choose to protect their marks from erosion in amicable ways. Thus, companies can and should be judged for the actions they do take.
The reason I called the original statement an 'aphorism' is because it's indeed true in a sense, but its simplicity hides the entirety of the situation. It's part of a larger trend of people abdicating individual reason and responsibility, and passing the decision making to a nebulous non-entity ("everyone else is doing it.."). If a professional job is performed this way, then the value-add of a person is merely a human face, and they should be replaced with a short shell script. Then the actual professional human up the chain can better exercise their own judgment.
You're right about Sparkfun being the responsible party - I misread the packaging, so sorry about that.
But there's no arguing that Sparkfun isn't in direct competition; it's a multimeter, Fluke sells multimeters, the fact that they're not in the same price bracket is beside the point. It's completely rational that Fluke would not want to dilute its mark by allowing an inferior product to go out in the same trade dress, so I don't agree with your notion that licensing it out would be OK and I don't agree with the poster above that a sticker is sufficient. And again, bear in mind that Fluke initiated a trade complaint, but it's CBP that ended up with the goods in a warehouse asking Spark to make the decision to pay for them to be sent back to China or to be destroyed. They have no way of knowing whther they're destined for a cool little company like Sparkfun or some dingy hardware store that's trying to fleece its customers by selling cheap knockoffs.
Really, the issue here is for Sparkfun - trademark searches are free these days, Fluke isn't even seeking any kind of compensation for them, so I don't know what their excuse is for not checking. If they were selling an mp3 player or a coffee mug in the Fluke black-and-yellow trade dress, then yes I'd be for some sort of licensing arrangement, and I agree that those often work out better for the trademark holder as a kind of free advertising.
