On Mon, Aug 05, 2002 at 02:01:58PM -0400, Boris Veytsman wrote: > > > > Unless Professor Knuth applies for trademark protection in the names > > "TeX", "METAFONT", and "Computer Modern", the only tool (as far as I > > know) he has at his disposal to *legally* enforce his wishes is > > copyright law. > > > > I am afraid you did not do your homework in this case. The names TeX, > METAFONT and Computer Modern ARE trademarked. Knuth transferred the > trademarks of TeX and CM to the American Mathematical Society, and the > trademark of METAFONT to Addison Wesley Publishing Co. Did he also trademark the filenames in question? If not, he has no legal recourse to prevent people from using them as they see fit (barring application of copyright law, which requires he own the copyright). Since it is almost certainly not possible to trademark a filename anyway, the solution seems fairly clear. We find a free font to replace this one with, and we drop it in place as cmr10.mf, excising the old computer modern font to the non-free archive. Suggestions for a suitable replacement are welcome. Neither attempting to convince non-developers who are not the copyright holders that there is a problem, nor arguing about the semantics of words in licenses, are useful ways to spend time. When semantics are unclear, a court could go either way. Since Debian is not likely to take the case to court and find out one way or the other, we must take the pessimistic viewpoint: All software is non-free unless conclusively and decisively proven otherwise. It is clear that these fonts have not been conclusively and decisively proven to be DFSG-free. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | Dept. of Computing, `. `' | Imperial College, `- -><- | London, UK
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