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Re: Trademarks: what is the line?



On Fri, Dec 31, 2004 at 01:28:56PM +0100, Jacobo Tarrio wrote:
>  Why don't I find this non-free? Because trademarks already affect you,
> whether you want it or not. For example, nobody can make a modified copy of
> OpenOffice and change its name to "Microsoft Office" without incurring the
> wrath of Microsoft, and that doesn't make OpenOffice non-free.

The specific tricky case here is where a program has 'branding' stuff
scattered all over the place, all of which is trademarked, so that
before you can modifiy it you have to go through and strip out all the
trademarked stuff.

It's not a major problem, because you can generate an unarguably free
work once by stripping it, and then everybody can modify the stripped
version instead.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
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