Re: trademark policy draft
On Tue, August 14, 2012 16:51, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> I agree with this. In dealing with lawyers on behalf of Debian, I've
> quickly learned that there are almost never "100% safe" or "100% risky"
> positions. It is *always* a cost/benefit/risk analysis. You ask the
> experts to evaluate the risks of the positions you're interested in, and
> then you pick a position.
It's surely a cost/benefit/risk analysis, but either of them is hard to
quantify.
We may know how much money we pay to the registration offices (do we?),
but there's also the manpower we spend on drafting a policy, processing
trademark requests, consuming the time of our legal advisors, etc. And a
potential cost in goodwill (being perceived as 'jerky').
The benefit is that we have a legal tool against someone doing something
nasty with our name. Which is nice to have, but doesn't come for free.
It's hard to quantify as well: the benefit is for a future situation of
which we do not know if or when it will happen. Or how many extra costs we
need to incur then to actually enforce our trademark in the legal system.
Keeping the trademarks has costs, the benefits are uncertain, and there
seem to be many examples of projects getting along fine without any. For
me the tradeoff is clear.
Cheers,
Thijs
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