"Sean Kellogg" <skellogg@u.washington.edu> wrote in message [🔎] 200612061912.41669.skellogg@u.washington.edu">news:[🔎] 200612061912.41669.skellogg@u.washington.edu...
On Wednesday 06 December 2006 18:47, Ben Finney wrote:Sean Kellogg <skellogg@u.washington.edu> writes: > On Wednesday 06 December 2006 14:30, Michael Poole wrote: > > Apparently law instead requires us to assume users are in fact > > morons in a hurry. What a sad state of affairs. > > Yes, that's exactly what the law requires. IANAL. I will merely draw to your attention that, as far as I can tell, the consistent usage of the phrase "a moron in a hurry" in trademark history has been to describe the level of confusion which trademarks should *not* protect.Fair enough. But there is a great deal of room between "Debian FTP Master" and "Moron in a Hurry" that is being glossed over here. In my own Linux Users Group there has been a lot of confusion over what is, and is not, Iceweasel and the why behind the change. I consider none of them to be morons or in much of a hurry.
It is unfortunate. And many people seem to grab onto the problem with the unapproved patches. I'm quite confident that would have been resolved, probably by MoCo maintaining a list of approved patches, and Debian making an exception to the no new upstream versions in stable rule. The problem was with the logo copyrights. That really confused people. People assume we meant the logo trademark, but that is not the case. Many people do not seem to understand that something can have protection in multiple ways. Indeed it is possible to have a whole bunch of protections.For example a computer chip can be protected by patent, mask rights, copyright (especially if the chip contains a standard mask rom, where the data contained therein can be copyrighted), and trademark (or related like tradedress, if part of the
design is unique and non-functional). That is a lot of protection. So it is not surprising that some users may become confused.