Re: Educational Community License 1.0

[Gervase Markham <gerv-gmane@gerv.net>]

On 29/08/11 15:18, Ben Finney wrote:
>> then effectively Debian policy is that no trademarks may appear
>> anywhere in Debian. The purpose of trademarks in law is as a
>> determinant of origin.
> 
> What in DFSG §8 (or in my explanation of it) makes this infeasible, in
> your view?

If you understand DFSG §8 to apply to trademarks, then the right to use
a trademark to identify the software must be offered to those outside
Debian. Debian also requires that software not be subject to
restrictions on its modification (DFSG §3). These two principles combine
to say that the the software, arbitrarily modified, must still be
permitted to bear the trademark. As any software can be incrementally
transformed into any other software, this effectively means the mark can
be used on any software at all.

I suspect you don't agree with that, so where is my logic wrong?

You could argue that trademark holders can grant the right to use the
trademark to Debian for the exact Debian version, and to everyone else
for the exact Debian version, and so everyone actually has equal rights.
But in practice, either this means that the trademark holder needs to
approve all changes Debian makes (which is generally unacceptable to
Debian, I understand) or the trademark holder says "OK, Debian, I trust
you, make modifications" - at which point, the licence becomes specific
to Debian again and you are back behind §8.

>> And such a 'trademark' is no longer a trademark (literally: a mark
>> used in trade).
> 
> This is a non sequitur AFAICT (nothing in what you're describing stops
> the mark from being used in trade), but it also doesn't seem to be
> crucial to your point.

To expand my brackets further: "(literally: a mark used in trade to
identify the origin of goods)". A mark anyone can use cannot be such a
mark, by definition, because it could be applied to goods of any origin,
and therefore does not identify origin.

Gerv