On Saturday, November 09, 2013 22:36:49 Steve Langasek wrote: > On Sat, Nov 09, 2013 at 06:00:01PM -0500, Scott Kitterman wrote: > > Both the original letter and Mark Shuttleworth's comments make trademark > > ownership claims that overreach. > > It's overreach based on the recipient's governing local law, not based on > the sender's. Isn't it the responsibility of each of us to know our rights > under law? If a corporation is attempting to police their trademarks > internationally and someone hosts a site in a jurisdiction that doesn't > recognize trademark rights at all, does the corporation have an obligation > to *not* try to protect their trademark by dissuading this person? Does the > answer change if your local law says that not policing your mark against > them could result in you losing the mark back home? Does it change when > the site is hosted in a jurisdiction that recognizes some subset of > trademark rights that you consider "reasonable", but that nevertheless > doesn't meet the standard for trademark defense in the corporation's home > jurisdiction?
I think the party sending such letters has a responsibility not to mis- represent the legal requirements for the recipient to take action. I think the EFF response is quite correct. Sending such letters is inherently chilling of free speech and open debate. > > I think it's entirely appropriate for Debian to work preemptively to > > protect itself from future bursts of enthusiasm from the Canonical legal > > department. > > I write the following as a Debian developer, not as an employee of > Canonical. Anyone who doubts this is welcome to check the Debian archives > for my posts in similar threads, because I have been consistent on this > point for years. > > In the event that an over-enthusiastic mark holder tries to tell Debian that > their nominative use of a trademark (in a package name, file name, etc.) is > infringing, the appropriate course of action for Debian to take is to > *reject these claims*, and continue using the mark. Not to buckle under > pressure and set a bad precedent for other mark holders to follow; not to > rename the software and cause confusion for our users. When we know we're > on the right side of the law, we should be resolute in our defense of our > rights. It shouldn't become a game where we pick and choose which names we > will and won't allow into the distribution based on how friendly the > trademark holder is. I agree. As far as I know, any use of Canonical trademarks in Debian is not the kind of use that it would cause our users confusion. I think it makes sense to remove incidental uses of they type that (I think) kicked off this thread, but I don't think it should be a high project priority to do so. I think we've run out of Debian related topic here, so I'll stop with this. Scott K -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/2815890.FKPk1ba8Fy@scott-latitude-e6320
