Quoting pilip ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > Is there any legal law or issue about using some linux logos on offered > training courses without permission from the company that owns the > distribution?
[Disclaimers: I am not a lawyer. Answer reflects my understanding of law in (primarily) the United States, and your local law may differ. The following is not intended as legal advice.] Trademarked images _are_ encumbered -- a bit. Because of the nature of trademark law and the risk of losing trademarks from adverse usage, companies that own them are motivated to exaggerate _greatly_ about the extent of their legal rights. For example, it's an exaggeration to say that one must secure permission for all uses. That is absolutely untrue -- yet, you'll hear that being claimed all the time. The only types of usage that violate a trademark owners rights are: o within the same trade, profession, market segment, etc., o commercial, and o of a nature that tends to falsely create in customers' minds the impression that the trademark owner endorsed or issued the competing goods. If the third-party usage fails to meet any of those tests, then it is NOT trademark violation, no matter how much the trademark owner complains and threatens. The trademark owner often _will_ complain and threaten, despite not having a case against the third party, because all trademark ownership lives on borrowed time, and will be lost as soon as it's used widely enough as a generic term. So, to defer that day's arrival, they threaten and bully people. > I'll try to explain my concern as much as I can, so as to > get a more convincing reply. In other countries, like in the US, if you > use Red Hat logos on your training materials or brochures, you're > supposed to give a disclaimer about their shadow man logo being a > registered trademark of Red Hat and they should be aware of this. Or you > might get sued if you don't. That is a wise thing to do, because it means you are _helping_ them defer the day of trademark ownership loss. So, rationally, they should not want to threaten or sue you. Even better would be if your materials _not only_ say the shadow man logo is a registered trademark of Red Hat, Inc., but also that Red Hat doesn't produce or endorse your services. You are not _required_ to state any of that. All you are obliged by law to do is avoid trademark infringement, as detailed above. But stating that is a very good idea for pragmatic reasons. > To cite an example, there is this training institute that is giving out > brochures which contain the Red Hat logo (shadow man).Though, there's > not even a disclaimer for using Red Hat's logo on their advertisement > which I've verified with a person from Red Hat saying that it isn't > legal, well at least in the US and in UK. Again, it is very common for trademark owners' claims about their rights to _vastly_ exceed what the law actually states. They pretty much have to do that: They're afraid of losing ownership. For example, I could download the RH9 binary i386 ISOs, modify the contents to have the name everywhere be "Rick Moen's NOT Red Hat Linux Distribution", and accompany every usage of a trademarked image, phrase, or style with a disclaimer saying "This software is the product of Rick Moen; Red Hat, Inc. neither produces nor endorses this product." Then, I could sell the resutling product, and tease Red Hat, Inc. by offering to sell them a copy. Two things would result: o Red Hat's trademark-protection office would be very annoyed, and o I would be absolutely safe from litigation. More at: http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2003/08/14/trademarks.html http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/trademark-law -- Cheers, find / -user your -name base -print | xargs chown us:us Rick Moen [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
