Kraftwerk

[helius]

Looks like the group's founder actually filed a suit against them!
http://hellokraftwerk.com/press#news_18

As well he should. Contrary to spurious claims like "trademark protection is generally limited in scope", the laws protect marks from being confused or diluted across all spheres. If a mark is has very wide recognition, it is protected in ways that obscure marks wouldn't be: any parallel use of the mark is trading on its popularity, and creating the belief that it is authorized. You can't sell "pepsi toilet paper" or "xerox tattoo art" even though those marks apply to fields separate from yours. The band Kraftwerk, I would guess, has very wide recognition and is protected in this way.

[Kilrah]

With the big difference that neither Xerox nor Pepsi are common words in any language beyond the well known brands. Kraftwerk is, when the band chose their name they deliberately chose a name that was a word describing a common object in their very own language, that should by definition exclude them from being able to make any claim around it.

I can't imagine if I created a music band called "knife" I'd get the right to sue anyone selling knives a few years later becasue my band became famous when knives existed for decades before...

[helius]

Except the whole world doesn't speak German, and the product this thread is about is also being sold outside Germany. There's no requirement for a mark not to have come from any spoken language. Should Atari or Akamai be denied trademark protection?

Now, if the product was a literal fixed power generator named the "Kraftwerk 20T" or something, that would be noninfringing because the use of the word was merely descriptive. But being merely descriptive would, by the same sword, invalidate a trademark for "Kraftwerk" for generating power. Either way, it seems to me that the inventors of the fuel-cell device received bad legal advice much like Batterizer.

[Kilrah]

Except the whole world doesn't speak German, and the product this thread is about is also being sold outside Germany.

It's a German guy, living in Germany, suing the US distributor of... the product of a German company.

Of course he's got every right to sue, but I'd expect (hope...) anyone looking at the case would laugh very loud and dismiss it straight away once they see the background. I'm obviously not a lawyer but it seems like the textbook example of "I'm just trying to get free money for absolutely no good reason". If such a thing could go through it would remove a couple more layers of my belief in the sanity of humanity (at least of the US legal system)...

[mux]

Their specs suggest 40g of butane yields "11 iphone charges", which at 5.5Wh average would be 60Wh, so 200g of butane (+ weight of container, 100gr?) would be 300Wh, i.e. approx. 1.5kg of Li-Po batteries incl casing/electronics.

So OK, 3x more... IF, and big if their specs are correct/realistic, and if it ever comes out... which I very highly doubt, becasue there's no way you could need 5 years between a proof of concept and not deliverying anything if there was any remote chance for it to meet expectations

They're using 'iPhone charges' in a very limited sense - at 'optimum' charging speed (1.5Wish), they can deliver the equivalent of 20Ah (=65Wh) (random publication: http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/198695-kraftwerk-fuel-cell-will-let-you-charge-your-phone-with-gas). So that's about as much as one of those larger USB battery banks, but at a much lower speed and not rechargeable in any kind of convenient way. The operational efficiency is highly affected by charging speed; at minimum power a lot of extra energy is lost in keeping the cathode hot and quite a bit of uncombusted  fuel is exhausted. At maximum power, they're losing a lot due to slow ion diffusion (high effective ionic resistance). So in actual use - i.e. your phone not actually charging at a constant rate but starting fast, then tapering down - capacity is probably a couple tens of percents lower.

But all of this is kind of moot. They're now bankrupt, they will never deliver. This is probably the very last time we'll see these graphite-based tiny SOFCs on the market. They were interesting when the first publications came out in the early 2000s, but lithium ion has progressed so much, phones have become so much faster to charge and most importantly there are many orders of magnitude more and easier ways to charge something from an outlet or a solar panel than with compressed dead dinosaurs. *maybe* we'll see more portable PEM fuel cells (using e.g. sodium silicide hydrogen cartridges) at some point, but other than that it's batteries all the way.