Adam,
On 28.06.2012 18:42, asaun...@uottawa.ca wrote:
It is unclear to me what OSM/OSMF policy is with regards to third-party
use of OSM trademarks.
I am not surprised that this is unclear to you because there is no such
policy, at least not any that's written down!
I have no authority to speak for OSMF, the trademark owner, but I can
say a few things:
* There were cases in the past where someone has sold a mobile
application through AppStore et al. the name of which was suitable to
make people think it was somehow an official or sanctioned product; in
some of these cases, people have been asked to rename their product.
* No such requests have been made in cases where people have offered
something that was clearly a tool made to support the project, like OSM
relation analyzer or OSM inspector or ITO OSM analysis (all three,
incidentally, made by commercial entities working with OSM).
* Individuals have been doing publications (My OSM Blog) without
asking whether it's ok to use the name. I'm one of the authors of a book
named OpenStreetMap and it seems this is ok too.
* National OSM groups all over the world have registered
openstreetmap.xx domains in their respective countries; they don't
belong to, neither are controlled by, OSMF.
* People have been producing OSM merchandise of all sorts - T-Shirts,
mugs, banners, stickers, pens - without asking OSMF, and nobody ever
complained.
I guess that I speak for many in the community when I say that don't
really want to put any obstacles in anybody's way - we wouldn't want
some eager community member in Brazil to wait for approval before he can
annouce his OpenStreetMap mapping party! So if we ever adopt a trademark
policy then it will be as liberal as possible, with a focus on
prohibiting misleading use of our name (e.g. someone calling something
OpenStreetMap when in fact it isn't, or people making things look like
we endorsed something we haven't).
But as I said at the beginning, I'm not aware of any policy already in
existence.
As a rule of thumb, as long as you don't do anything that provokes a
community outcry you'll probably be ok.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09 E008°23'33
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