Re: Trademarks: what is the line?
On Sun, 02 Jan 2005, Francesco Poli wrote:
> On Fri, 31 Dec 2004 12:44:33 +0000 Andrew Suffield wrote:
> > 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.
>
> That's true, but... ...what's the difference between a
> trademark-encumbered work and a patent-encumbered one?
>
> If I take a patent-encumbered work released under a free copyright
> license, I can generate an unarguably free work by stripping the
> patented algorithms and replacing them with non-patented ones: then
> everybody can deal with the stripped version...
There really isn't a difference between the two.
We don't go looking for trademark problems, just like we don't go
looking for patent issues. When they find us, we should eradicate the
patent or trademark encumbered part of the work in question, assuming
that's possible, replace it with something unecumbered so the work can
function, and carry on our merry way.
In the case of Mozilla, the trademark problem seems to have found us,
so the maintainers of the package need to figure out what do do about
dealing with them, either through some sort of free trademark license
(unlikely that that's even possible) or by replacing the trademarks.
Don Armstrong
--
Quite the contrary; they *love* collateral damage. If they can make
you miserable enough, maybe you'll stop using email entirely. Once
enough people do that, then there'll be no legitimate reason left for
anyone to run an SMTP server, and the spam problem will be solved.
Craig Dickson <crdic@pacbell.net>
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
Reply to: