Re: Is the old trademark suggestion still reasonable?

[Arand Nash <ienorand@gmail.com>]

On 17/04/11 16:36, Francesco Poli wrote:
> On Sun, 17 Apr 2011 14:05:44 +0100 Arand Nash wrote:
>
> > Hello.
> >
> > I'm shallowly involved with a game project which I hope someday might
> > make it into Debian.
>
> You mean
> http://www.redeclipse.net/
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/redeclipse/
> don't you?

Indeed

> Impressive screenshots, I wonder which is the license for the game
> data...
>
> Also, I seem to remember a number of licensing issues for the Cube
> engine:
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/04/msg00093.html
> and the thread that followed (also with some messages that broke the
> thread).
> Have those issues been solved in the meanwhile?

Partly solved I would say, currently for Red Eclipse (and from how I 
interpret the license) there are only a few bits (sounds[in progress 
upstream], font, logo, name) which is non-DFSG.

My plan is to attempt to, for the next minor release of the game, try to 
fit it into non-free and work with upstream to maybe, hopefully, take 
care of these bits and make it into main eventually.

The majority of game data is CC-BY/CC-BY-SA (disagreement noted).

> > [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/04/msg00122.html
>
> I personally think that that trademark license *draft* is still a good
> starting point for a possible trademark license which doesn't cause
> DFSG troubles.
>
> Two big warnings, though:
>
>   A.  that trademark license was a *draft*, not a final
>       ready-to-be-adopted text; I was waiting for additional
>       input before going on, but that input has never arrived:
>       http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/04/msg00154.html

Noted, I just wanted to make sure it wasn't considered the plague or so, 
now when it has had some time to sit.

>   B.  that trademark license was being drafted as a proposed
>       fix for the non-free Debian logos; the issue with Debian
>       logos was later (partially) fixed in a different way:
>       http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2008/11/msg00048.html
>       http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2008/11/msg00063.html
>       http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2008/11/msg00066.html
>       The announcement was then done on a DPN issue:
>       http://www.debian.org/News/project/2008/15/
>
> One additional warning is that I was personally involved in the
> drafting of that proposed trademark license: as a consequence, I may of
> course be a little biased in my opinion on it...
> Let's wait for the answers of other debian-legal regulars!

Yes I'm aware of this, but the way I understand things is that using the 
Expat/MIT straight off (as in the case of the swirl) ends up with a very 
weak trademark protection. And using the restrictive with-debian license 
would end up non-free.
Or am I mistaken here?

--
aran