Re: Origins of debian "swirl" / does Debian want to keep its trademark?
Scripsit Nathanael Nerode <neroden@twcny.rr.com>
> Henning Makholm wrote:
>>On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine that the Elektrostore
>>swirl is independently created starting from a straight brush stroke.
> Now, Debian really ought to be complaining about this.
There was an attempt to make this happen back in 2002, but it
apparently floundered due to confusion about whether SPI or
one of Debian's constitutional offices had the initiative.
That being said, I am not sure that we could make a trademark
complaint stick under Swedish law. The Swedish law (varumärkeslag
1960:644) seems to establish a standard of "confusability", and it
might be argued that by making the swirl blue and turning it such that
it invokes an the idea of an "e", it is not anymore sufficiently
confusable with Debian's logo that the trademark is violated.
Copyright could be relevant, but who actually owns the copyright to
the Debian swirl? Was it transferred from the winner of the logo
contest to SPI, or do we just have a license?
> They're in the same industry so there's a real risk of confusion..
Not really. Elektrostore.se sells white goods - cookers,
refrigerators, dishwashers, washing machines, etc. Most of these items
probably contain microprocessors, but I doubt if any of them run Linux.
--
Henning Makholm "We can hope that this serious deficiency will be
remedied in the final version of BibTeX, 1.0, which is
expected to appear when the LaTeX 3.0 development is completed."
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