On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 11:46 AM, Ting Chen<[email protected]> wrote: > It is the law that forces us to do this. > > For example according to the american trademark law if we don't > effectively take strength to defend our trademark, we will lose the > right on them. Which would mean that one day everyone, every company can > use our name and our logo to do EVERYTHING. This is one issue. The other > issue is that other companies could occupy the name and the logo and > register it as their trademark, so that one day we will lose the right > to use them. This thread is real. There were companies who tried to > register the name Wikipedia in China. And the logo of the german > newspaper Taz was once occupied by another company in Germany.
The Apache Foundation logo is a registered trademark AND licensed under the Apache license. A number of very old companies hold trademarks on logos that have passed into the public domain under copyright law due to age (Coca-Cola for example). Other companies hold trademarks that are ineligible for copyright to begin with due to lack of creativity. Commons has a very large collection of such marks [1]. It is entirely possible to vigorously defend a trademark against confusion in the marketplace (e.g. the traditional domain of trademark law) while also relaxing copyright restrictions to create an authorized use regime. For example, creating guidelines on when Wikimedians are allowed to use WMF logos inside and outside the projects would be a start. The fact that all our logos remain "all rights reserved" is very unbecoming for a Foundation committed to free content creation and dissemination. -Robert Rohde [1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Company_logos _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
