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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."
As far as I can see the Firefox trademark policy isn't fundamentally different from Debian's own trademark policy.
If you are distributing what Debian distribute you can call it Debian. If you want to do something different, call it something else.
Isn't that essentially what the Firefox trademark policy says?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Given the issues over the naming, I am surprised that they aren't more thoughrough with their checks.
I liked this when I was 12-- HBO used to show it all the time:
"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."
1984-- a very good year-- Macintosh first appeared, Firefox on HBO, and Airwolf on CBS. Best... tv show theme... ever.
Go to Help -> About Firefox...
"Some trademark rights used under licence from The Charlton Company."
Cotton needed frequent replacement, and nylon was cheaper than cotton (and didn't wear out). Next time you needed new line, you bought nylon.
I have the ultimate solution to all of our trademark issues. Simply use MD5 hashes instead of the original names. d6a5c9544eca9b5ce2266d1c34a93222 is catchier than Firefox anyways.
Alternatively, they could go with this catchy number: 13B10\/\/5C|-||_|N!<Z
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Actually, everything is about intrinsic value. Capitalism and socialism falsely assume that this property applies only to money, which is why they don't work so well. Other things beside money do have intrinsic value -- but not that can be meaningfully measured in pounds, shillings and pence.
There is a small but growing proportion of society that is recognising the inapplicability of money to all situations. Still, while the Old Rulers have power, they will want to do anything they can to keep the Old Systems which benefit them in place.
Not only do trademarks have to be registered in a specific field, but they have to be registered in a specific class of product or service. Still, the guiding principle is whether use of the mark will cause confusion for the public.
When I registered my trademark for my band (Highland Sun, http://www.highlandsun.com/ I received a letter from someone who was registering a mark for "Highland Sun Farms" - a horse ranch somewhere (in Kentucky IIRC) asking me to stop using the name as it infringed on his. Even though our two uses of the mark (including graphical design/logo) are completely unrelated, his trademark attorney advised him to contact me. (For a variety of reasons, my claim to the mark had sufficient merit, so I am still using it to this day.) Much as I hate anything associated with IP law, I recognize that that guy was just doing his job, protecting the value of his client's mark.
Having just read through about a half of the debian trademark debate, I'm glad I don't have to wrestle with it. And I give props to the guys who are standing on their principles. I can see valid points on multiple sides of the debate.
1) The guiding principle of Free Software is to give users the freedom to use and distribute the software, without unreasonable restrictions. There are a few restrictions of course, like - you must not claim the software as your own if you didn't actually write it - you must attribute it to the actual authors. In other words, you are prohibited from being a jerk about it.
2) The basic premise of trademarks is that there is value in a name, and that value and name must be protected. As such, use of a trademarked name is tightly controlled, pretty much by definition. (If you're not going to worry about controlling use of the name, then there's no point in getting the trademark registration in the first place.)
I believe if you carry the principles of the Free Software Foundation to their ultimate conclusion (reductio ad absurdum, in this case) then they are incompatible with all three forms of Intellectual Property - copyrights, patents, and trademarks. Because in order to use a piece of software, you need a handle with which to refer to it. Even if I give you the code for free, if I don't let you call it by the same name that other people call it, then your use of the software is severely hampered. e.g. "I just wrote this C compiler. I call it the GNU C compiler. You're welcome to use it too, but you can't use the same name, because I'm afraid you'll make modifications to it that harm its quality, and I don't want your version to harm the reputation of my original code. So you're not allowed to use the words "GNU", "C" or "compiler" in any combination in reference to your copy of it."
Fortunately, nobody needs to carry it to that extreme, because the FSF's goal isn't just Freedom for the sake of some abstract philosophical condition, the goal is FAIRNESS. That's why reasonable restrictions are part of the GPL and other FAIR licenses. "You may distribute modifications of this code, but you must clearly mark your modifications. You must use a different version number. etc..." That's fair - it avoids people confusing your copy for the original, but it allows you to keep referring to it by essentially the same name, so that when people see "gcc-4.0.5-hyc" they have some idea that "oh, this is a customized version of gcc" and they don't have to ask themselves, "wtf is this buffalo-chip-code-generator doing on my distro and why should I care?"
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...
See DFSG #8:
Nogunna... nogunna... nogunna-work-here-anymore?
Actually it was Redhat (as in GNOME) who first declared KDE to be illegal. Only Debian believed them. Everyone else who looked at the issue dismissed the fearmongering.
But the damage has been done. Even as recently as two months ago Debian was on the kde-core mailing list claiming that the QPL was no longer a Free license, despite RMS' assurances that it is.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!