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Re: Registering the Debian Logo as our trademark?



* Brian Gupta <brian.gupta@brandorr.com> [2013-04-22 16:58]:
> 1) Gnome foot is licensed under LGPL/GPL and is a registered
> Trademark: (Pretty much all artwork including the foot is licensed
> under Copyright law under LGPL/GPL).

GNOME actually has a good example of why it makes sense to license
your logo freely and yet claim trademark rights.

As Brian pointed out, copyright and trademark do different things:
copyright is about modification (in this case) whereas trademark is
about brand identity.  While we can use a DFSG free license for the
logo, we can use our trademark rights to make sure there is no
confusion as to our brand.  In reality (as you point out, Paul), this
limits the ability to make changes to the logo as it would likely
cause confusions around the brand.

However, there are situations where this is not the case.  GNOME has a
really good example: someone took the GNOME logo and replaced the foot
with a fish in order to use it for a fish-pedicure company.  This is a
valid use of copyright (their license allows modification) _and_ of
trademark (there is no confusion between a piece of software and a
fish-pedicure company, even if they use similar logos).

See this LWN article for more information:

LFCS 2012: Trademarks for free software projects
https://lwn.net/Articles/491639/

It contains a copy of the GNOME-derived fish-pedicure logo.

-- 
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/


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