It's because trademarks are far more fragile than published copyrighted works. If somebody photocopies a book published by McGraw-Hill, and puts it on the Net, they won't like it and will sue you to cease & desist, but they won't really mind if that takes a couple of months. If however you publish a lurid blog post with their logo and accuse them of financing a secret society of anti-copying cyberspies who report names to the government for IP blacklisting, they would go into high-priority PR damage control mode, whether it was true or not, all the more so if it wasn't. That's because their good name being dragged through the mud affects everything they do.
A budding brand like ours needs protection to grow, but also needs exposure to grow. Approving trademark licensing applications on the basis of a functioning e-mail address will not assure our brand's protection - we need to do a basic minimum of checking. Prevention will be far more economical in time & energy, and fruitful for a cooperative relationship, than the cure of chasing after those who damage our marks (perhaps even inadvertently since they never had a contact to ask questions to). Sean On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 5:10 PM, Chris Ball <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Sean, > > > I don't see how the opposite is true. Just look at Sony. To be > > clear, by "freely" I mean without conditions. The snag is that I > > don't see how we can be sure we have a legal handle on acceptance > > of our conditions without an explicit license. Again, this is a > > change from my original position of two weeks ago. > > I think the reason I'm quick to assume this is possible is that it's > how the GPL works. Either you are complying with its conditions, > in which case you have a (copyright) license, or you are out of > compliance with its conditions, in which case you don't. > > I don't see why the same idea of an automatic license that is only > granted while its conditions are met would fail to be usable in a > trademark license, but maybe there's a reason I haven't thought of. > > Thanks, > > - Chris. > -- > Chris Ball <[email protected]> > One Laptop Per Child > _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
