Re: "Debian" Core Consortium
Benj. Mako Hill wrote:
> The stated goal of the trademark committee was to come up a policy
> that was as permissive as possible (in the DFSG sense) while still
> operating within what is required by trademark law. Unlike copyright,
> failing to enforce or taking a completely permissive attitude toward a
> trademark will actually lead you to lose it. That may be fine with
> some in the project but my sense from reading this thread and others
> is that most people in the project like having Debian refer to stuff
> made by the Debian project and not to anything by anybody.
I believe that what we want is a policy which prohibits classical trademark
infringement, while allowing "trademark dilution", "trademark defamation",
and other newfangled "crimes" which extend the purpose of trademarks.
It really should be simple enough.
The trademarks may be used in any way to refer to the Debian Project or the
Debian system. Additionally, they may be used in any way which does not
cause a likelihood of confusion as to the origins or endorsement of any
goods or services.
So they may *not* be used to refer to a product which is not endorsed or
created by the Debian Project, or an organization which is not the Debian
Project, unless such product or organization is in a sufficiently different
field that there is no likelihood of confusion.
I think we pretty much all agreed on debian-legal that this was our goal for
a policy, and that we should enforce such a policy.
To elucidate on a small point, I think Debian should ask people to call
packages in the ".deb" format just that, not "Debian-format packages",
unless they are actually Debian packages.
> No. It's still a goal to draft a policy. The trademark committee has
> been distracted from writing a policy by a very long list of
> international disputes, trademark licenses, international registration
> and other actions I'm not remembered.
Oh my.
--
ksig --random|
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