Re: I'll let the Freemasons know Debian is distributing their trademark
On Tue, Jan 11, 2005 at 02:38:34PM -0500, William Ballard wrote:
> I dare you to package the golden arches as clipart.
> Or Mr. Peanut.
What good would that accomplish?
[I'm hoping you can give me a meaningful answer.]
Also, is there some reason to represent a "Mr. Peanut" instead of just
a regular peanut? Are we trying to sell those products or something?
These are real questions -- some sorts of uses are appropriate for a
trademark, and some require that the trademark holder either protest
strongly, in a legal sense or lose control over them. The details of
this sort of thing depend on the trademark.
In other words, if $X is a problem with trademark $a, $X could be
completely legal with trademark $b.
As an aside, if you want to get some company's logo, usually a google
image search of the form `company name logo` will get you a copy.
Of course, there are still copyright issues, but if you're just going
for a general idea of what "typical use" is for a specific trademark,
google is a good place to start. [But note that this is just a start --
this will only find you pages which have that particular text associated
with the image. For example, you'll find ten times as many image hits
searching for `square compass` than with `freemasons logo`... not that
all of those hits are relevant.]
Anyways, if you want to see something packaged which hasn't been, it's
usually a good idea to package it yourself.
If you want to assert that some use of some trademark is illegal please
present a coherent (and accurate) explanation of what sort of problem
that use causes for the trademark holder.
--
Raul
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