Re: Possible violation of the Debian trademark
On 2004-04-13 00:15:05 +0100 Michael Banck <mbanck@debian.org> wrote:
On Mon, Apr 12, 2004 at 07:16:02PM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
It would be nice if there were a few more obvious links, but I'm not
sure
we can stop them. At least in trademark laws that I know, one can
use a
trademark accurately and the holder cannot prevent it.
Uhm, but they're using www.debian-desktop.org, which surely violates
our
namespace?
There may be registrar rules to stop it. That is not a "violation of
the Debian trademark" like the subject of the email says.
Can we show that debian-desktop.org is being used abusively, invoking
UDRP <URL:http://www.icann.org/udrp/>? AFAICT, "debian-desktop" would
need to be judged "confusingly similar" to "debian" (anyone know about
this lawyerbomb?), that they have no right to use the mark (probably
true) *and* the domain is used in bad faith. Used in bad faith is
holding to ransom (not the case here), deliberately blocking
trademark-holder use (unknown, but looks unlikely), disrupting a
competitor (no), or trying to increase traffic for commercial gain
through confusion with the trademark (said "community website" and
carries no ads, so seems unlikely).
If they'd use just a random domain and go talking about Debian, that
would be fine, but I'm /really/ uneasy about them having that domain.
It's a guy developing desktop stuff for debian. I think
debianplanet.org and debianshop.com are more confusing (and they're
really not very confusing, well apart from debianshop.com not working
on a no-JavaScript no-popups browser, but that's confusing in a
different way).
BTW, their content changed back to something much more neutral and
non-commercial (basically, a guy talking about his packages) when I
just
checked again.
Yes. I saw the more commercial edition and I thought that was mostly
fine too. The "plain" edition is even less likely to confuse people
that it is a debian project site.
--
MJR/slef My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
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