On 2013-11-29 03:20, Vincent Untz wrote:
Hi Karen,
Le mardi 26 novembre 2013, à 00:47 -0500, Karen Sandler a écrit :
As a lawyer I want to point out that the main thing about our trademark
is
to make sure that users (under the law: consumers) aren't confused
about
what comes from GNOME and what doesn't. This is extremely helpful when
you
have real jerks who try to distribute software that isn't GNOME or free
software but use our name and logo to fool people into downloading it.I
have seen some really bizarre uses of our logo and to my knowledge we
have
only enforced when we think the use is confusing. As was also pointed
out
by someone else, we've had many friendly discussions that have resulted
in
better uses of the marks for all.
Do you have some concrete examples of confusing/misleading uses of our
logo where we had to enforce our trademark?
Sure! There was an android app that was using our logo as their icon.
They had nothing to do with GNOME. They just changed their logo/icon
when we asked them to in a friendly way (after a little bit of follow
up). There was a software consultant that was using our logo on his
webpage (and he was not working on GNOME). There are others (and a
couple I have outstanding to follow up on) but those are the ones that
occur to me now as obviously confusing use of our trademark in software.
It's been obviously quite some time, but from my years in the board, I
only remember misuses that were actually not in the software field, and
I wonder if things are the same or if it got worse.
There are still a lot of uses that are not in the software field, but
often in these cases when the logo has been modified, because it's not
related to software that often is ok as no one would be confused. Like
the time that someone used our logo for a fish pedicure business,
turning the base of the foot into a fish :) (I loved that, as its the
perfect example of how it's beneficial to license the copyright of a
logo freely even as you exert trademark restrictions over it, something
that's hard for trademark lawyers to grasp).
Also, how do we define the right balance? In the Ubuntu GNOME example,
I
would consider the project to be both part of the Ubuntu and GNOME
communities, so imho, it should be entitled to use our trademark.
I think they should definitely be able to use the mark. I still think
the right thing to do is to talk to them to find the best use of it for
both projects. We did the same thing in a friendly way with Debian,
even, as well as with events related to GNOME. Obviously we feel great
about the activities and the use of the mark in principal. I don't think
that this is a big problem. Because Ubuntu is not the GNOME Foundation,
if the use is outside our 3rd party trademark guidelines (which again, I
think can be improved), we either need to grant them special permission
or ask them to change it to be consistent with our guidelines and
continue to establish a legal record of regular defense. I would expect
them to want to talk to us about what works as well (for example,it was
awesome that they consulted us about what name they should use). This
shouldn't be an adversarial thing at all.
karen
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