On Sun, 2007-06-10 at 17:57 +0100, Jon Grant wrote: > Does anyone think any "trademark torpedo" prevention clauses should be > added?
Personally, no, although I do have sympathy with the viewpoint you put forward. A trade mark is, fundamentally, something unique you can use to identify yourself as the supplier of something. That's basically incompatible with a copy of free software, which could come from anywhere, and even if it's identical to your version the supplier is still different. It does seem pretty clear to me that trade marks can be used to make modifying/distributing free software more difficult, but I'm not sure how you can get around that. Trade marks don't have to be registered; you could be sued for passing off (though the standards are a fair bit higher to meet). You'd essentially be asking people to commit to not sue you under those rights, but I'm not sure how that could be enforceable without a proper contract. There are any number of ways an original author can make license something as free software but essentially make it difficult/impossible to redistribute or modify. Personally, I wouldn't worry about it that much - it's only really a problem if third parties can impose those kinds of restrictions. In the case of the original author, they're not bound by the license and can therefore do what they please anyway. Cheers, Alex. _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
