Re: Skype/Facebook trademark logos in Debian packages
Ben Finney dijo [Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 11:04:33AM +1100]:
> > I agree. What about MSN butterfly [1], ICQ flower [2], etc ?
> >
> > "ICQ, THE FLOWER LOGO, THE ICQ NETWORK and/or other ICQ products
> > referenced herein are trademarks and/or servicemarks of ICQ. […] No
> > license is granted to you in this Agreement, either expressly or
> > implicitly, to use any trademark, servicemark, names, or logos of ICQ,
> > including ICQ and the flower logo."
>
> The question is, does one *need* the trademark holder's permission to
> use the trademark in this way? I thought using a trademark specifically
> to *refer to* the product was clearly allowed under trademark law in
> most jurisdictions. Would someone explain why that's not so?
Hmm... Pidgin _refers_to_ each of those services when your contacts
appear with the relevant logos; we are also not packaging a MSN-like
server package (yeah, yeah, just imagine it was not tied to their
domain name), so you could count this as referring to their site.
However, we _are_ providing an application functionally close enough
to each of the relevant services it implements - To the untrained eye,
Pidgin could perfectly pass for the MSN, ICQ, Gmail or whatnot
client. And if the program appears functionally close to the official
one and has the official logo, it smells like a trademark breach in my
book.
--
Gunnar Wolf • gwolf@gwolf.org • (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244
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