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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."
Have ANY of these important linux questions been answered in a court yet? i.e. How enforcable is the GPL, and IS "linux" a trademark?
Ignore Alien Orders
The logo these guys (still) have elektrostore.se
some debian-legal discussion
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
It's not up to the open source community to look after their own trademarks and stuff like that. There should already be initiatives for non-for-profit or (cyber)community-minded groups like the OSS community to get a hold of trademarks for non-for-profit reasons. I live in Australia, and I think we've got fair(ish) copyright laws, but not something like this. Does anyone live in a country that has this sort of system/law?
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
You are confused. trademark is a monopoly claimed over the usage of a label (eg - the name "Debian") so that people can't pretend to be you or otherwise create confusion or damage your reputation.
I dont want to start a flamewar, but surely "Linux" is more distinctive than "Windows", "Apple", "McDonalds" etc etc
Yeah right, Like Im gonna write a sig.
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.
Here's Project Leader Branden's Robinson's full (much longer) comments on the trademark issue.
His main point seems to be that trademarks can lead to forking, whether it be forced by the trademark holder or voluntary, and that these trademark forks can lead to confusion (Why are these forked version unofficial? Is it really the same product? Which is the 'best' version?), inefficiency (harder to share code between forks) and fragmentation of the open-source community. Moreover, the implicit threat of trademarks - play by our rules or lose the name - seems at odds with the ethos of freedom to make changes that at the core of the free software movement.
He ends with three main questions that Debian will have to resolve:
* Why even have a trademark? What protections does it give that are useful for Debian? How do these protections different internationally, within dozens of different national jurisdictions?
* What is the approval process for using the Debian trademark? Should some groups get automatic approval, or should Debian leverage its trademark to compel vendors to contact Debian?
* Can we apply the Copyleft principle to trademark? That is, how can we turn trademark on its head and make it a tool to promote the open and free use of Debian and other projects instead of a device to restrict the rights of others?
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).
With due respect, you clearly don't have the faintest clue what "generic" means.
Generic is when you use something that might be a trademark to refer to anything vaguely similar. For example, in Britain it's common to use the word "hoover" to refer to a vacuum cleaner of any brand: you have Hoover hoovers and Dyson hoovers. What that means is that "hoover" is becoming generic, and soon it might get to the point where Dyson could actually describe what they were making as hoovers, and Hoover wouldn't be able to sue them for it.
Likewise, Xerox have had to go to tremendous efforts to protect their trademark: if you stopped talking about copiers and started talking about xeroxes (of any brand), then the Xerox mark would have become generic. But we don't, we talk about copiers: so Xerox is not generic these days.
Now, is Linux generic? Of course it isn't! When you talk about Linux, you are talking about an operating system based on the Linux kernel. You wouldn't say "Microsoft Windows is a popular linux", or talk about the "FreeBSD linux", or say "OS X is based on the Mach micro-linux", because the generic term is "operating system" or "kernel", and "Linux" is the unique name for a particular kernel used to power a particular set of operating systems.
Sorry, but the Australians called it wrong this time. There may well be valid arguments against a Linux trademark, but genericity ain't one of them.
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.