Re: Inbound trademark policy, round 3
Uoti Urpala <uoti.urpala@pp1.inet.fi> writes:
> Russ Allbery wrote:
>> DFSG #4 is narrower than the possible actions that could be required by
>> a trademark policy, at least in the way that we've normally interpreted
>> it, since we've not interpreted it as allowing the renaming to affect
>> functional elements of the program. In other words, our historic
>> interpretation of DFSG #4 is that saying that you have to rename The
>> Foo Library to something else if you modify it is okay (if not
>> preferred), but requiring that you also rename all the functions in the
>> public API from foo_* to something else is a violation of the DFSG.
> Does the naming of library functions really fall under trademarks? I
> wouldn't expect the use of a trademarked name as part of a function name
> to require permission (so even if a trademark policy had a clause trying
> to forbid that, it'd have no effect on an otherwise renamed program).
I don't know. I'm not a trademark lawyer. It's not obvious to me that
they don't, though, given that the purpose of trademarks is to avoid
causing confusion in the general public, and having a modified library not
eligible for the trademark providing an identical API seems like it would
pass a prima facie test for possibly causing confusion. (Please note:
that doesn't imply that I think such a case would win in court
necessarily, only that it's not obvious to me that trademarks don't
apply.)
There was extensive discussion over whether the Firefox trademark applied
to the command-line program, which strikes me as a very similar sort of
case. As with the API of a library, the command-line invocation is the
interface that's exposed to the user of the product.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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