On Thu, Aug 03, 2017 at 11:07:44PM +0200, Simon Poole wrote: > The LWG would like to start a period of public review and consultation > on our draft trademark policy, that we intend to bring forward to the > OSMF board for adoption as a formal policy, please see the text here: > > > https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Trademark_Policy#OpenStreetMap_Trademark_Policy
This is a very well-written document and the will to create a fair policy is clearly visible. But it immediately opens a whole slew of questions for me, many of them concerning my own projects. * Section 2.1 forbids anything called something like "OpenThingMap". This form of name is very popular, there are numerous existing examples (OpenPOIMap, OpenTopoMap, OpenSeaMap, ...) Do all of these have to change their names? * I have a written an open source software called "OSMCoastline" (among many others), this clearly contains the "OSM" abbreviation. The use of this software is very specific to OSM data. It doesn't make sense for this software not to have OSM in its name really so much is it tied to the OSM data. Can it keep this name? There is no mentioning of software in the policy at all. * I am running the website openstreetmapdata.com where people can download OSM-derived data and only OSM-derived data. Currently all services there are free, we are only asking for donations (and receive almost none). But I want to reserve the right to charge for services there. The character of this site is in between a community site and something commercial. It comes out of my engagement for OSM and the OSM community, but it is not something run by the OSMF or so. It is run by me and Christoph personally and we might want to move it more into the direction of a commercial enterprise in the future. I know I am not alone with this, there are many sites that are half-open, half-community, half-commercial. And that is, in my opinion a good thing, because it is a way for OSM enthusiasts to move to something where they can make some money with what they are doing and sustain their services. But it raises the question of where community ends and trademark licenses are needed. It is quite clear from the policy that I can not keep using that domain name. What is not clear to me is how I have to do the wording on that site to keep within the Trademark Policy? Lets say I changed the site name to megaawesomedownloads.com, what else would I have to do? All the data on there is 100% derived from OSM data. I don't want to invent any bugus "product names", when I offer "OSM coastline data" for download, that describes best what you can download. Is a website a "Publication" in the sense of the section 4.3? If such a policy is introduced, I would hope that the OSMF provides some proactive guidance to the many many people already doing good things based on OSM and help them get into compliance. I fear many people will rather stop offering their services instead of understanding the legal issues involved. This is especially important, because - from my limited understanding of trademark law - it is necessary to actually defend your trademarks if you want to keep them. So unlike the data license violations which the OSMF can ignore as much as it wants to without limiting what they can do in the future, the OSMF has to actually defend its trademark. So if the OSMF says that, say "OpenSeaMap" is not according to our policy, it HAS to fight it (even if nobody really minds them using this name) to make this stick. So just ignoring some violations and fighting others isn't possible. Which opens the whole question of whether the OSMF is organizationally and financially in a position to actually do this fighting? If not, why have this policy? Jochen -- Jochen Topf joc...@remote.org https://www.jochentopf.com/ +49-351-31778688 _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
