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Debian Questions Trademark Policy
An anonymous reader writes "The OSS/developer community at large is paying more attention to the trademark issue, especially since Linus Torvalds bid to trademark the name 'Linux' in Australia failed recently. Branden Robinson, Debian's project leader, says the current trademark policy needs updating to ensure it has the appropriate level of protection against legal challenges. Robinson said there are various questions that project members must address when deciding how to change the policy. These include whether Debian Linux should have a trademark at all, and whether the trademark can be used to penalize those who 'prey upon' the community."
If the GPL is "not enforcable", whatever that means, then you are using my copyrighted code without a licence and I sue you :)
In the meantime, signal your intentions by updating every internal and external document you can find to read Debian(TM). Same goes for Ubuntu.
Remember: a trademark protects the name, not the content. Trademarking the name of a distro does not attempt to take away or add anything to the copyright or software licences of any component. It just prevents evil corporate bastard or pakistani virus spreader from calling his CD of spyware, viruses and trojans "Debian".
Is there any trademark attorney out there who would help these people pro bono or at reduced rate? If there is an appeal, I would certainly contribute to the filing costs.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Yea, I was thinking the same thing. There was no word "Linux" before, whereas all of your other examples plus countless more trademarks are very common words.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
So enforcable no-one's dared challenge it. There have been plenty of companies with the motivation to go up against it if they thought they stood a reasonable chance of winning, and none of them have tried.
and IS "linux" a trademark
In some countries, yes, definitely, Linus only got the trademark after a legal battle when someone else trademarked it. However, in Australia it isn't. It just depends on local laws.
I am trolling
the poster claims that the logo in question is identified as a rotated Debian logo even when compared pixel-by-pixel. Simply using the same Illustrator brush shouldn't produce that kind of similarity, should it?
Illustrator has the facility to draw spirals based on a set of mathematical criteria. The default spiral settings plus the default brush used also makes the exact same debian logo. There wasn't much creativity put into making that specific debian spiral.
A free operating system logo made on a non-free graphics app running on a non free operating system, created with non-free default settings and a non-free font used throughout debian. That's just wrong.
RST
I think the most important reason that Linus got rejected and surprisingly hasn't gotten rejected more places is because he has quite frankly waited to long. When a term becomes generic it is sort of hard to hold a Trademark over anyone and make a big fuss about it. It may vary by different countries but the same term can be trademarked multiple times so long as they are not crossing field, it is also important to rememble that symbols can be trademark if they are shown to be in someway unique.
Seriously, I think that the term Linux has been in use so long that it has become a fairly generic term. While protection of the name may be somewhat important, the fact that it is in use and fairly generic would prevent others from trademarking it, where it isn't trademarked (or should at least).
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
actually, it's not only "Microsoft Windows" - it is plain windows that is considered an infrigmns@#&%@. whatever that word is spelled :)
remember lindows ?
i really believe that passing around trademarks for common words is wrong and that's exactly what's happening.
Rich
Regarding the notion that Debian might not want to "have a trademark at all," they really don't have any choice, strictly speaking.
Trademarks aren't trademarks simply because they've been successfully registered. They're trademarks anyway, but registration affords some ADDITIONAL protections, beyond what a non-registered trademark gets.
Any mark that's used in commerce is automatically given trademark rights and protections under common law in almost every western nation, including the US and Australia.
The real issue in this case is that trademark protections are weakened when they are not protected by the owner of the mark. So if Debian lets anyone use "DEBIAN" for commercial purposes whenever they like, it will be hard for them to then go and protect that mark in the future.
Hell, depending on the examiner, it may already be unregisterable due to lack of protection.
IT's too late, the horse has already bolted, if only people would have listend to RMS and called their distributions GNU-Linux Linus may still have had a chance.
The reason you can't trademark Linux is because well, there's Redhat Linux (That's GNU-Linux + lots of other stuff), and Linux programming 2nd edition (and it's not about kernel programming) and a quick google for linux turns up
Linux
www.microsoft.com/getthefacts Read in-depth 3rd party performance analysis of Linux & Windows.
as second on the list!!, and that's not about the Linux kernel either.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.