On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 11:01:18 +0100 Josselin Mouette wrote: > Le mercredi 29 octobre 2008 à 23:34 +0100, Francesco Poli a écrit : [...] > > > nor may "CodeIgniter" appear in their name, without prior written > > > permission from EllisLab, Inc. > > > > IMHO, this goes beyond what is permitted (as a compromise!) by DFSG#4, > > since it forbids an infinite set of names, rather than a single one. > > I cannot use any of the following names for a derived product: > > CodeIgniterNG, CodeIgniter++, SuperCodeIgniter, TinyCodeIgniter, ... > > In all cases you will not be allowed to use such names unless you obtain > a trademark exception, so I don’t think this is problematic either.
There are some important differences between just avoiding to grant any special trademark-related permission and putting a specific no-name-including-this-string clause in a copyright license. First of all, a no-name-including-this-string clause may well be more restrictive than default trademark law. A case where this is particularly apparent is the PHP one: I am not allowed to use any name including the string "PHP" for a derivative work of PHP, not even something like RALPHPANTHER or TELEGRAPHPOLE! Those example names are not confusingly similar to PHP, as far as I can tell, and trademark laws usually insist on avoiding confusion, rather than on substrings... On the other hand, it should also be noted that a clause in a copyright license cannot prevent me from writing a (non-derivative) work from scratch and calling it "PHP++": so maybe such clauses do not even fully reach their goal... Secondly, one thing is having something forbidden by trademark law, one different thing is adding copyright violation to the picture. If trademark law already forbids something, why should I prevent it through copyright law as well? [...] > > Warning: indemnification clause: is it acceptable? > > It smells as non-free, but I would like to know the opinion of other > > debian-legal regulars... > > At least this is already accepted in main, see e.g. postfix. I don't like the IBM public license either, but that's another story... -- On some search engines, searching for my nickname AND "nano-documents" may lead you to my website... ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == C979 F34B 27CE 5CD8 DC12 31B5 78F4 279B DD6D FCF4
pgpetVJAsEnXq.pgp
Description: PGP signature
