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Mozilla Cracks Down On Merchandise Sellers
An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine reports that the Mozilla Foundation is cracking down on those selling unofficial Mozilla-branded merchandise. This takes the form of an open letter addressed to retailers of goods that bear the Mozilla name or logos. The letter suggests that the Foundation are willing to work with those selling Mozilla wares, as long as they get a cut and the retailer isn't operating in the US, Canada or Mexico, where they would be competing with the Foundation's own Mozilla Store. Threats of legal action for non-compliance are issued, albeit with friendly overtones. This open letter is part of the Mozilla Foundation's campaign to better enforce its trademarks, an effort that began when the Foundation was launched in July. In a related move, the Foundation announced that the new Firefox artwork is not open-source and can only be used in official builds or those sanctioned by the Foundation - this has led to debates about whether Firefox is free enough to be included in the Debian Linux distribution."
Isn't Mozilla a generic name used in all headers for web browsers? I'm pretty sure IE6 uses the word "Mozilla" in it's information headers...
What are they trying to do? Copyright a generic name?
I know I'm missing something, but shouldn't they be encouraging this form of free-adversiting?
More power to them I say. Free Software shouldn't be equated with the right to brazenly steal from those who provide it.
Just on the trademark thing, I think because of obvious reasons, the Mozilla icon in Japan is a fat "mo" in hiragana. I thought I'd point it out because it seems ironic that it's not Touhou (big japanese media company that distributes most of movies, good anime, and more importantly the Godzilla series) isn't doing the rademark legal actions...
(I mean, I am all for Moz, but the irony is unignorable)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
They have to defend the Mozilla trademark, I'm sure the lawyers told them to cover their ass and do it already, so they did it. It doesn't seem any more complicated than that.
I guess it is fair to put a stop to such brand dilution. No matter how free a product is, it is still important to maintain its identity based on some standards/rules. Without such control, the brand/goodwill will eventually become less valuable.
Some might argue if you're doing something for free, why do you want to protect your branding. Well, branding is what consumers look for in making a decision (most of the time), and if a company can maintain a strong branding, it is able to continue pushing its mission/objective using the same brand, and consumers will continue to use products based on that mission/objective.
If Sun didn't control the use of naming of Java, we might have too many different version of *Java*, and eventually consumers couldn't find one to stick to and the standard might be lost.
Imagine if people start printing Slashdot logo all over all kind of vibrators...
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
There are 2 seperate issues here - while they may both stem from trademark they are NOT the same.
The Debian issue is due to the fact that Mozilla.ort does not want people taking the Mozilla icon data and using it other things - for example, they don't want me writing a Bittorrent program and using the Mozilla icon in it.
However, that means that part of the Mozilla source tree is NOT freely reusable - not even in a GPL style context. I can take a chunk of Mozilla *code* and put it in my GPL program, but not the Mozilla *artwork*.
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Now, the second, seperate issue is this issue of folks making Mozilla mugs, hats, jackets, license plates, doggie dishes, and what have you, and selling those. THAT IS NOT A CODE ISSUE!
That is a STRAIGHT trademark issue - if Mozilla.org does not control such issues they will lose the trademark.
Now, first of all I think it's a pretty damn good sign that people feel it is worth making Mozilla branded whatnots - it is a sign we are winning, REJOICE!
However, it IS pretty scummy to cash in on the Mozilla name and not give back. Sure, I'd buy a Mozilla patch for my jacket, but I'd want to know that at least SOME of the money was going back to Mozilla.org!
So chill out, folks. Take a breath, read the letter, engage brain.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I realize that AOL does not own the Mozilla Project or the Mozilla Foundation (please see my other posts).
Maybe those items are what Open Source is about for you. You seem to have more pragmatic concerns in mind. However, other people feel differently. OSS, for me, is an idealistic venture as well as a pragmatic one. I really like the idea of freedom of ideas and information. OSS seems likes the best implementation yet of my ideals. However, pressing legal action for trademark violation is certainly not something that I can support in good conscience.
I respect your viewpoint of OSS and its purpose, but realize that many would disagree.
Probably dumb luck, but it's interesting that this happens less than 48 hours after I put this page and sent it to the licensing and marketing folks at Mozilla - mainly because as they mention in the letter they don't offer much in their store. God forbid the community try to continue this grass roots movement that is OSS an get the word out that there is something on the planet besides IE to use.
I sent a request to their licensing folks to see if I can continue to offer the free graphics I spent a few hours on (reworking the FF logo as a vector, etc.) for download, but I'm not feeling too good about the reply I'll get. I guess that no one in this industry can work on something for the love of working on it, everything has to boil down to a f*ck!ng paycheck. I guess it's true that everyone has a price, and everyone that has a product used by more than 3 people HAS to have a team of lawyers to make being a fan/supporter hell... pretty damn disappointing.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society - M. Twain
I actually see it as more of a way to prove authenticity. By only allowing the logo to appear on official builds, it's a way for users to know that this binary was built and (theoretically) tested by The Mozilla Foundation (tm). Debian, RedHat, and everyone else are all free to include Moz in their distro, but unless they're using Moz-built binaries, they can't include the logo. Thus, the user knows whether it's an official Mozilla build or not. Makes sense to me, anyways...
do not read this line twice.
HERE HERE!! You know something I forgot to mention in my earlier posts, since I have wore my "Unofficial, illegal, paid for out of my own pocket with no profit potential, done out of love for the product and the OS movement" Firefox t-shirts I've had more than a dozen conversations with complete strangers about Firefox. They went similar to the conversation you mentioned above. If we had to wait for programmers to become clothing vendors, none of those conversations would have happened, and that was only two times ONE person went out in public with FF's logo on their chest. This is a devisive move on Moz's part and a bad move in general considering the fact that their most ardent supporters are going to be turned off by this sort of action.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society - M. Twain