Re: licence for Truecrypt
On Sat, 01 Jul 2006, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> don@debian.org wrote:
> >They do, but those clauses have been pointed out as being problematic
> >multiple times. Copyright licenses should not need to invoke copyright
> >law to secure protections which trademark law grants to trademarks.
>
> And still, nobody has been able to convincingly explain why this
> would not be DFSG-compatible.
The reasoning is that it not only require a name change, but also
disallow entire classes of names, many of which have no relationship
to the original name. This goes beyond what the letter of DFSG 4
allows. [You may argue that DFSG 4 was always intended to allow this
type of clause, but it does obviate the preceeding line of argument.]
My favorite example is that the PHP clause prohibits you from calling
a derivative of PHP "TELEGRAPHPOLE" even though they're not
confusingly similar and has no relationship to the original name,
besides containing PHP.
> >They're out of scope.
>
> Which may be an interesting point, but not really related to
> freeness.
Perhaps, but we're discussing licenses here and what they do; trying
to protect something that's a trademark using copyright seems rather
pointless to me, because it only affects people who are using the
work, not those who want to capitalize on the mark's notoriety for
other purposes. CF google water.
Don Armstrong
--
"Facts" are the refuge of people unwilling to reassess what they hold
to be "True".
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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