On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 09:38:29AM -0500, Steve Langasek wrote:
> http://www.spi-inc.org/contact lists various contact addresses for SPI.
> I'm not sure which address is the best to send to.
I'm an officer of SPI; I'll bring it up to the rest of the Board, and to
our legal counsel. In fact, I'll just CC the Board right now.
> Yes, this particular use of the Debian logo is particularly troubling.
> Though perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that a site affiliating itself
> with a government that consistently violated human rights also steals
> copyrighted material. ;)
Well, let's keep the rhetoric in check.
In a literal sense they may have infringed the copyright license on the
Debian Open Use Logo:
Debian Open Use Logo License
Copyright (c) 1999 Software in the Public Interest
This logo or a modified version may be used by anyone to refer
to the Debian project, but does not indicate endorsement by the
project.
Note: we would appreciate that you make the image a link to
http://www.debian.org/ if you use it on a web page.
However, this license is DFSG-unfree. The issue of modifications isn't
even addressed, let alone on whether restricting the use to references
to Debian violates DFSG 5 or 6.
Before we raise hell with this site, I suggest we consider the irony of
shipping a non-DFSG-free graphic in lots of packages in main.
I advocate the application of a DFSG-free license to the Open Use Logo.
But to get back to this purportedly Taliban website:
Note that trademarks and copyrights are different things, and a very
liberal copyright license would not necessarily preclude SPI from going
after abuse of the Debian Open Use Logo on trademark grounds.
There are, of course, many reasons why SPI might not attempt to enforce
a trademark action in this case:
1) our lawyer might advise us that we can't (I don't know if we
have filed for trademark protection on our logos);
2) our lawyer might advise us that we would be unlikely to
prevail, due to jurisdictional or other issues;
3) our lawyer might be unwilling to pursue an enforcement action
on a wholly pro bono basis, in which case the Debian Project
and SPI need to decide whether it's worth spending money to
do anything about this;
4) Debian and/or the SPI membership might decide it's not worth
the trouble;
5) we might first politely ask them to use a different logo, and
they might agree
<offtopic remarks>
As an aside, I would remind people that to date no evidence of the
Taliban's involvement with the attacks of 2001-09-11 has been offered to
the American pubic (or the world public) by the U.S. government. All
we've heard are assertions of "confidence" in (classified?) information
from political leaders. There has been no jury trial of anyone yet[1] as
there was following the bombing of the World Trade Center in the 90s.
While I'm content at present to work under the assumption that Osama bin
Laden ordered last year's attacks and that his Taliban subordinates
carried them out, this is only for sake of convenience in conversations.
It's a plausible hypothesis, not yet a convincing theory of the crime.
Of course, my skepticism stems in large part from my propensity to not
trust my government not to lie to me about the temperature outside, let
alone things I can't personally verify.
[1] http://cryptome.org/usa-v-zm-082902.htm may be mildly interesting
to those interested in the Zacarias Moussaoui hearings.
</offtopic remarks>
--
G. Branden Robinson |
Debian GNU/Linux | De minimis non curat lex.
branden@debian.org |
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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