Re: [IAEP] Scenarios for licensing our trademarks
I don't think brand-building - raising awareness of what we do - is an eithor/or proposition killing collaboration. However, I guarantee 100% that a weak trademark policy will lead to no awareness raised. The challenge of marketing is to get people who don't know or care about something to do so. Mozilla has done a fabulous job of building market share from marginal Netscape, and a brand from zero. Just look at how Microsoft has been steadily losing market share monthly for years. That would not have been remotely possible without a strong brand and smart marketing (the full-page NYT ad for the v1, a classic manifesto). I don't understand how they have killed collaboration when they have a vibrant ecosystem of add-ons, with a portal useful enough for adapting to the ASLO portal. The GNU GPL succeeded in copyright because it was well-thought-out. What we are aiming for is a trademark policy as effective as Ray Dolby's or Intel's, but without the cost, designed to raise awareness where it isn't - teachers and education tech buyers. This wouldn't be as necessary if the distros had strong brands and could promote Sugar. However, unfortunately they don't. In our ecosystem, the strongest brand is the little green $100 computer with the crank, the image most people likely have of the project. Sadly, none of OLPC's brand equity leverages Sugar, which is always absent from press releases, absent from the boot screen, given short shrift on the OLPC website, etc (cf. http://laptop.org/en/laptop/software/index.shtml with screenshots but not even a link to the Sugar Labs website). The most fruitful marketing collaboration Sugar could obtain would be from OLPC. In this regard, I am hopeful that Walter's trip to Miami will improve that impasse, there's a lot of work to do. Sean On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 5:42 AM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: Quick comments : I agree with C.Scott's remarks 100%. Being too strict about copyright or trademark is an easy way to kill collaboration in the cradle, and Mozilla's done most of this (including guidelines for logo modification and reuse) very well. On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 1:43 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@cscott.net wrote: 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 Right -- in the current situation where there's no active body to enforce, I would also think that focusing on getting as many people as possible to use and play with Sugar would take priority. my $0.02, SJ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Scenarios for licensing our trademarks
This wouldn't be as necessary if the distros had strong brands and could promote Sugar. However, unfortunately they don't. In our ecosystem, the strongest brand is the little green $100 computer with the crank, the image most people likely have of the project. Sadly, none of OLPC's brand equity leverages Sugar, which is always absent from press releases, absent from the boot screen, given short shrift on the OLPC website, etc (cf. http://laptop.org/en/laptop/software/index.shtml with screenshots but not even a link to the Sugar Labs website). I just want to interject that there is a link to the sugarlabs website from there, it is right under the screenshots. Maybe not very prominent but it is definitely there. Also if you click, try sugar for yourself, it takes you right to the sugarlabs wiki. -Alexander Sean ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Scenarios for licensing our trademarks
Quick comments : I agree with C.Scott's remarks 100%. Being too strict about copyright or trademark is an easy way to kill collaboration in the cradle, and Mozilla's done most of this (including guidelines for logo modification and reuse) very well. On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 1:43 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@cscott.net wrote: 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 Right -- in the current situation where there's no active body to enforce, I would also think that focusing on getting as many people as possible to use and play with Sugar would take priority. my $0.02, SJ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Scenarios for licensing our trademarks
[Again restricting post to iaep because I cannot cross-post] On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 03:59:09PM +0100, Sean DALY wrote: If we extend our trademarks use freely, we 1) run the risk of losing them 2) will be unable to build awareness of the brand. The same is true of the opposite and I fear this is where we're currently heading for. If derivatives cannot use our name (see [1] for an example I personally consider ridiculous) or need to jump through considerable hoops they will simply choose a different one, excluding our name from part of the market. I'm sure we both have the same goal and I certainly appreciate your hard work on this. But I think a more liberal trademark policy would benefit us much more than a firm one. I hope we can agree on some middle ground between the (highly successful!) Debian one and the Mozilla one (successful as well, but starting to get competition from the Debian equivalents like iceweasel). [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Trademark_case_studies#.24DISTRO CU Sascha -- http://sascha.silbe.org/ http://www.infra-silbe.de/ signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Scenarios for licensing our trademarks
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 c...@laptop.org One Laptop Per Child ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Scenarios for licensing our trademarks
On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 12:04 PM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com 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!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
