On Fri, Oct 15, 2004 at 02:12:41AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > Therefore, I think the biggest question for us is: > > 1) Do the default protections that attach to trademarks, even when > unregistered and unmentioned (not even with a "(TM)"), infringe upon the > freedoms the DFSG purports to defend? I suspect that strictly as stated, no. Trademark dilution will stop this for most works - anything which has been repeatedly branched in the past, for example. You would have real trouble defending a trademark on 'glibc', 'gcc', or 'emacs' at this point. However, there almost certainly exist scenarios in which trademarks can be an issue. > In lieu of pursuing all of the above questions exhaustively, I propose the > following: > > P1) Adopt a kind of don't-ask, don't-tell policy regarding implicit > trademarks. Many free software developers don't give a whit about > trademarks, and some don't even care how much their software is patched > by third parties while retaining the name. So, if you maintain a > package that doesn't assert any trademarks, don't worry about it. For the above reasons I'm inclined to agree that this is safe. > P2) If a package does assert a trademark, contact the mark holder and ask > for a trademark license that permits usage of the marks under the same > terms as the copyright license that has been attached to the > corresponding work, wherever applicable. As with abiword, the main thrust here is: "Can I call a modified version foo, even when you don't like the modified version?" So that makes a good opener for people with no comprehension of trademarks; it'll rapidly categorise them into people who are and are not willing to grant a free license. (Answer appears to be 'no' for abiword; DFSG aside, we can't really afford to distribute it with trademarks intact) -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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