Cease & Desist on using the word egress. Sign it away for eternity?

Question

I'm a small time founder of a TLS firewall. It is published on AWS and GCP marketplaces as 'secure egress gateway' and allows outbound/egress VPC traffic to be filtered by TLS versions and hostnames (which are set through the parameter store in AWS for example.) It's DPI and not a proxy.Last month, received a C&D from lawyers of a co that holds trademark over the e word. So far, I have agreed to remove all use of the word except in a descriptive context and the time has come to sign an agreement with the other co.The proposed agreement is perpetual. My lawyers strongly suspect the other co would refuse to agree to include a term that the agreement terminates after a set period of time, or if they were to lose all of their registered trademark rights in that word. Lawyers are funded by an insurance policy I had luckily taken out and bill every 6 minutes of their time.Should I push back on the perpetuity of this agreement? Should I get a second opinion?

thaumasiotes · Accepted Answer

What are you getting out of this agreement? They already can't stop you from using a word descriptively. They can sue you and lose, but they can also do that after you sign the agreement, on exactly the same theory they'd use anyway ("this use isn't descriptive").
Also:
The product name "secure egress gateway" is obviously a descriptive use of the word (it's a gateway for egress traffic), and therefore cannot violate a trademark. Are they asking you to avoid non-descriptive use of the word ("for your email security needs, contact Egress Software Technologies!"), or are they asking you to avoid using the word in product names regardless of whether the use is descriptive?

tothrowaway · Answer

If you don't mind sharing, what kind of insurance policy did you obtain? It's surprising to hear an insurance product would cover your legal fees for something like this.

EVurja · Answer

Egress is such a generic word in technology. Wonder if anyone can even trademark a generic word.

rckoepke · Answer

I wonder, when www.egress.com picked the name Egress, did they have a discussion where they decided it would be a normal part of their business plan to sue unrelated companies ad infinitum, for the life of their business?

DrScump · Answer

Is it too late to sue P.T. Barnum?http://www.ptbarnum.org/egress.html

stargrazer · Answer

Can you state who this company is?Isn't "secure egress gateway" descriptive as well?

Cease & Desist on using the word egress. Sign it away for eternity?

If you don't mind sharing, what kind of insurance policy did you obtain? It's surprising to hear an insurance product would cover your legal fees for something like this.

Egress is such a generic word in technology. Wonder if anyone can even trademark a generic word.

I wonder, when www.egress.com picked the name Egress, did they have a discussion where they decided it would be a normal part of their business plan to sue unrelated companies ad infinitum, for the life of their business?

Is it too late to sue P.T. Barnum?
http://www.ptbarnum.org/egress.html

Can you state who this company is?
Isn't "secure egress gateway" descriptive as well?