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Firefox Faces Trademark Issues
daria42 writes "The Debian development community is currently hotly debating whether the Mozilla Foundation's strict trademarks policy violates Debian's social contract. However, in a twist, it appears Mozilla has not received approval for the Firefox trademarks yet, and the Firefox name may already be taken in the UK and Germany. The foundation has not applied for the Thunderbird trademark anywhere yet."
Checking the USPTO's website, it appears that the FIREFOX mark will be registered shortly.
The mark was published in October of 2004, meaning the trademark examiner had approved it other than the required statement of use.
The examiner, after there were no oppositions filed, issued a notice of allowance, basically saying, "the mark is O.K., but you need to show use before registration will issue."
And on June 7th, the specimens of use that Mozilla submitted evidencing use were accepted. The acceptance letter stated:
"The Statement of Use (SOU) filed for the trademark application identified above has been accepted. This acceptance means that the mark will register and the registration certificate will issue in due course barring any extraordinary circumstances."
So, in the U.S. at least, FIREFOX (the mark) is good to go.
Although I completely agree with the parent that ZDNet articles are worse than useless, there has been recent discussion on the debian mailinglist. Don't know why it's not in google yet (too recent), but the thread on debian-devel starts here.
Just saw an article on Le Monde (in French) saying that FF now accounts for 14% of internet traffic in Europe overall, with anything from 7% (Lithuania) to 30% (Finland) in individual countries. It seems kind of amazing to me that in Germany it has achieved 24%. Is this the fastest new product acceptance in history? (Chime in if you can think of a faster /bigger one).
The trouble with so much success is that people are going to come out the woodwork claiming trademark issues. And I can only wonder what will happen when it reaches 50%...
Or for a fix that doesnt require changing FF rename the file to .zip open and change install.rdf so that
s ion>0.10</em:maxVersion>
s ion>1.0.4</em:maxVersion>
.zip to .xpi
<em:minVersion>0.10</em:minVersion>
<em:maxVer
is
<em:minVersion>0.10</em:minVersion>
<em:maxVer
then rename the
Lima India November Uniform X-ray
Does anyone remember the FireFox film staring Clint Eastwood where his character is a US Air Force test pilot who is on a mission to steal a prototype Russian jet-fighter.
FireFox and FireFox Down are two books by Craig Thomas of which the film is based upon the first book. Both fun to read - I'd reccomend it if you liked the old cold-war inspired novels, although the 2nd book was written after cracks started appearing in the Iron Curtain.
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
The Firefox trademark was allowed for registration on 2005-04-15. It's currently in the "publication and issue section", where they print up the nice certificate with the seal and ribbon and send it to the Mozilla Foundation, print the notice in the Official Gazette of the United States Patent and Trademark Office and send it to all Depositary Libraries, "enter the trademark upon the Principal Register", and do all that 19th century stuff.
But it's been a done deal since April.
Ok now the mods are definitely on pot. Firesomething was a plugin created (as a joke) after the Firebird -> Firefox name change. It allows you to pick up weird names like firegoat, waterbird, etc.
Maybe it's just a pity it doesn't say:
The license may require derived works to carry different name, version numbers and/or trademarks from the original software.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Debian is definitely pedantic about licenses, but I think that's better than having license issues come back to haunt them in the form of a lawsuit.
Debian's decision to distribute something is usually not a legal decision. Some developers fear that documentation licensed under the GNU FDL (even with no invariant sections) compromises the free software ideals Debian subscribes to. This is the public justification, the real reason is likely some desire to inflict harm on the FSF, Richard M. Stallman, Debian, or all of them.
I wouldn't worry too much about the licensing wars. Debian has comitted itself to keep to the non-free section. For a typical end user (who owns an x86 machine), there are few practical differences between the main and non-free section.
Has anyone actually bottered to check the PTO in the UK before going off on one about how Firefox is already registered?
If you go over there and have a little look you will notice that the mozilla foundation has filed their trademark application and none of the other firefox applications directly conflict with it. There are others in class 9 but none of them specifically list web browser (which the firefox applicaiton does) as part of the application. The biggest threat, IMHO, is 2007607 which bangs on about software but from an analysis point of view. IANAL but I would say that firefox will probably be granted the trademark in the UK at least.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
From what I gather, the whole issue that the debain people have with the firefox trademark, is that if you change firefox with a bug-fix the license implies you have to rename it.. Debian was granted permission to do this and still use the firefox trademark in debian systems.. however some at debian feel that the debian versions, first of all need to be able to be used in any linux system, and secondly that if debian can have the ability then any linux distrubutor (no matter how small) should also have the same abilities,, and that it is unlikely that all linux distributors would have such privliges
Personaly, although I admire the moral stance that debian is debating, I don't see the problem. Fix the bugs, submit the fix to mozilla. From here you have 3 choices.. give your users the fixed firefox called firefox with mozilla's blessing, wait for mozilla to distribute your fixed version so you are supplying what everyone else can have, or fork your own debian firefox based browser (I think this is unacceptable to debian though)
I really don't see what is wrong with doing BOTH of the first two choices. support all of linux, but still service your users as quickly as possible.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
> If you are distributing what Debian distribute you can call it Debian. If you want to do something different, call it something else.
Actually no. If you publish the original Debian, it's an "official release" and you can use the Debian swirl logo together with the "magic lamp". If you make a derived version, it's a "vendor release". You can still use the swirl, but without the "magic lamp".
http://www.debian.org/logos/
http://www.debian.org/CD/vendors/
Please note that on both logos you can use the word "Debian".
The problem here arises because AFAIK the Mozilla Foundation has no such strategy, i.e. there's no name that distributors can take if they change the sources.
Apparently it's been registered in Germany since 1995! "Firefox" as a trademark for use in computer software, computer consulting, etc. (trademark group 42 in the German trademark system) has been registered in 1995 to "Firefox Communications Limited, Solihull, GB". Presumably these are the same folks holding the trademark in GB. :-))
A short research in the publically searchable database of the German national patent and trademark registry (http://dpinfo.dpma.de/ would have shown that.
Since they trademarks have been registered in 1995, I find it highly unlikely (but not infinitely improbable) that they were registered in order to "cash in" on the Firefox browser popularity.
Mind you, "Firefox" has also been registered by Volkswagen in 2005. So watch out for the new VW Beetle Firefox (with tabbed driver's seat) at a car dealership near you
Dan.
I'm the person at the MoFo responsible for the trademark discussion with Debian. Please read my blog post on the subject to get the correct story.
Yes sure, I expressed myself badly. I meant the application name in the title bar of the window. It's now Debian Thunderbird and not Mozilla Thunderbird.
What you shouldn't be surprised about anymore is alarmist stories in the media.
In fact, they were pretty thorough. When mozilla.org announced the name change, the trademark holder in the UK was mentioned; also mentioned was the deal negotiated with that trademark holder. Oddly enough, the article doesn't contain that last bit of information. Not inflammatory enough, I guess. ^_^
Gervase Markham has a response up on his blog that should probably be read if you find this story interesting.
Read at Gerv's blog. So much for the quality of ZDNet journalism. :)
This has been debated in debian, and the resolution was to not distribute debian with the original trademark, just the swirl (the other one is with the bottle). See screenshots at: http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?re lease=361&slide=41&title=debian+gnu/linux+3.1+scre enshots
The're not making up rules for others they don't abide themselves, MoFo has repeatedly been asked to provide for such an alternative but denied it (for obvious reasons)
Is owned by Triumph Motorcycles both here and in the states. It's licenced to Ford (?) for use on automobiles.
You can have multiple users of words like that so long as they don't compete [hint: Apple ... before itunes].
That and I don't see why they care. Spend more time developing and less time lawyering.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
One of the Spanish leading manufacturers of fire extinguishers Fire Fox
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083943/ Directed by: Clint Eastwood Plot Outline: A pilot is sent into the Soviet Union on a mission to steal a prototype jet fighter that can be partially controlled by a neuralink
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
RTFA. Nobody is contesting their right to the name, but the entire first page of comments (and thanks to the miracle of slashcode, the same comments on the next few pages) is a bunch of speculation and whining about their new name, or who is suing whom, etc.
In fact, the article title is crap. They don't face "trademark issues", Debian just doesn't like the Moz trademark policy.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
The "Firefox" trademark has been filed at OHIM.
The application was published on 14/03/2005. According to the regulation, there is a period of 3 months during which anyone can file an opposition before the registration.
The delay expired 3 days ago.
The mark can be considered as "Registered" (provided the registration fee is paid).
I'm glad that Slashdot pointed this out so that someone else can go register these names first.
Debian is a linux distribution that consists of tweaked and patched software fitted together into a coherent system. Their standard practice is to make slight changes (bug fixes, security fixes, et al) to software to make it fit their system and their quality expectations.
Mozilla Firefox's trademark clause does not allow *any* changes (no bug fixes, no security patches, can't fix a single misspelled menu item and still call the result Firefox afterwards).
Accordingly, Debian can then either:
a) not include Firefox
b) call it something else (that users will not be familiar with)
c) submit code to Mozilla Foundation even for utterly trivial things, even for wholly Debian specific things of no interest to anyone else... and *WAIT* until someone at MoFo incorporates their change (or doesn't)
d) accept that on a whim Debian is *for now* granted ad-hoc exception to the rules (which may later be revoked... did BitKeeper teach people anything about revokable rights?)
e) find some way of getting MoFo to change policies
Instead of making dumb comparisons that only a Slashdot moderator could dub insightful; they decided to have a serious discussion on the issue.
e) b) and d) are the favoured solutions thus far in that order or in this order: e) d) and b) depending on who you ask.
Mind you Debian actually has somewhat flexible and clearly document rules regarding their logo (which is "trademark stuff"--is it not?) as opposed to MoFo's "you can use it if we feel like excepting you from our trademark clause" approach: http://www.debian.org/logos/
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