On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 12:04 PM, Sean DALY <[email protected]> wrote: > 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).
There are a lot of assumptions here, not all of which are obviously true. It would be worthwhile to review the Mozilla trademark policy more closely: http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/ It has been viewed as a counter-example, but I think that's mostly reflex from the Iceweasel debacle (which involved a lot of grandstanding and showboating on both sides); IMO their policy has a lot of good features. The "Community Edition" trademark policy grants you an automatic license to the Mozilla/Firefox marks if you comply with a set of conditions. The details aren't strictly relevant to this discussion (but it might be worth keeping in mind that the Firefox Sugar activity could have been made to comply with the "Community Edition" restrictions, I just didn't have time to do so). It is an automatic license, in particular: "It is very important that Community Releases of Firefox and Thunderbird maintain (or even exceed!) the quality level people have come to associate with Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. We need to ensure this, but we don't want to get in people's way. So, we are taking an optimistic approach. Official L10n teams can start using the "Firefox Community Edition" and "Thunderbird Community Edition" trademarks from day one, but the Mozilla Foundation may require teams to stop doing so in the future if they are redistributing software with low quality and efforts to remedy the situation have not succeeded. Doing things this way allows us to give as much freedom to people as possible, while maintaining our trademarks as a mark of quality (which we are required to do in order to keep them). In particular, when making changes to preferences or adding in extensions or plugins, we recommend that localization teams contact the Mozilla Foundation in advance to discuss any quality concerns that may arise. Rigorous testing of the effects of these extensions and plugins is generally necessary to ensure high quality." http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/l10n-policy.html This seemed a sane and sensible policy to me; I think it would be a very reasonable approach for Sugar as well. --scott ps. Discussions about "ease of enforcement" should really be made in conjunction with actual plans and budgets for enforcement. In the absence of any dedicated funds for legal remedy, trademark defense is pretty toothless -- you're almost better off in that case maintaining ignorance of violators, since non-prosecution of parties known to be in violation of the trademark can cause the trademark to be removed for "non-use". In the absence of a better public citation, I'll point to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Maintaining_trademark_rights -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
