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Wikipedia Threatens Artists For Fair Use
Hugh Pickens writes "Can a noncommercial website use the trademark of the entity it critiques in its domain name? Surprisingly, it appears that the usually open-minded folks at Wikipedia think not. The EFF reports that Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern have created a noncommercial website at Wikipediaart.org intended to comment on the nature of art and Wikipedia. Since 'Wikipedia' is a trademark owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, the Foundation has demanded that the artists give up the domain name peaceably or it will attempt to take it by legal force. 'Wikipedia should know better. There is no trademark or cybersquatting issue here,' writes the EFF's Corynne McSherry. 'Moreover, even if US trademark laws somehow reached this noncommercial activity, the artists' use of the mark is an obvious fair use.' It is hard to see what Wikipedia gains by litigating this matter, but easy to see how they lose."
Does anyone think he would get away with creating "CryslerArt.com" ?
WikipediaArt.org is not different.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Am I the only one who laughed after reading this?
iI is hard to see what Wikipedia gains by litigating this matter but easy to see how they lose.
It is easy to see how they lose if they don't defend it also.
... now imagine I use that same domain to host a mirror of Wikipedia.org and push to steal their market share. I advertise and insert tiny little advertisements and I am commercial. And suddenly the good folks at Wikipedia are out of luck. Wouldn't you want them to be able to protect that which they've established?
Ok, not to defend them but just to get you thinking about their perspective, they are attempting to protect their name. Not profits or anything really evil, just their name.
What would you say if I wrote a mischievous program and hosted it at iwikipedia.org? Wouldn't you want them to be able to go after me and shut me down?
Ok, so that's an extreme case
So for malicious intent or even just to protect what they've created, I think they should be able to sue wikipediaart.org but I would hope they could just ask them to change the name to wikiartrights.org or artonwikis.org?
They probably would qualify for fair use if the site wasn't a wikimedia site. In this case, Wikipedia is concerned about people misunderstanding that the site is hosted and part of the wikipedia suite (or commons or whatever they call it). I think they would have no problem with the name if it had a different layout/format or if the name was different and it looked just like that. I don't know how this qualifies as fair use and Wikipedia may have a point in their fear that people would misunderstand the site.
My work here is dung.
Quoth Wikipedia itself:
A trademark typically becomes "genericized" when the products or services with which it is associated have acquired substantial market dominance or mind share. The term is legally significant in that unless a company works sufficiently to prevent such broad use of its trademark, its intellectual property rights in the trademark may be lost.
IANAL but, as I understand it, if Wikipedia are too free and easy about defending their trademark they won't have a leg to stand on when "Wikipedia Britannica" or "Microsoft Wikipedia" appear.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
It's better to have a judge rule "it's fair use" now than have a judge rule "you didn't defend your trademark" five years from now.
Why has the WMF gone after WikipediaArt but not Wikipedia Review or Wikipedia Watch? These two websites have been notorious for "outing" the real identities of editors and encouraging vote-stacking etc.
I don't think that's fair. A trademark, as we should all know, must be defended where it's use could be considered infringing. Use of the trademark to identify the service in question is perfectly acceptable, as in wikipediasucks.com. However, the cited domain, wikipediaart.org could quite easily be taken to be affiliated to Wikipedia, particularly since the site is running a Mediawiki install. I can't say I blame them for going after this, though I hope they don't overkill it.
[FUCK BETA]
When I saw the summary title, I immediately thought of paypalsucks.com. However, this is different. Nobody would think that paypalsucks.com was run by Paypal (*), and it is a commentary on paypal, so it is not infringing trademark. Wikipediaart.org sounds like something run by Wikipedia.
* Interestingly, googlesucks.com is owned by Google. They took the domain name to dampen criticism visibility. See: googlesux.com
Not really. This is simply an action taken by the foundation to control any content related to their name, and trademark. We've seen this before, Mozilla vs. Debian was the latest "fight". It's important to understand the differences between brand and content. Whatever content I have associated to my brand is also my responsibility. If the content inside my brand is open for everybody to use, distribute, modify etc. it doesn't mean that one can distribute it in the name of my brand.
Let's say I write a short story, signed by me as the author, and give you a copy. I tell you that you're allowed to do whatever you want with the contents of this short story, be it reading, modifying, redistributing. Would it then be ok for you to change the contents, impose as me and redistribute it? No, of course not. So you see, these two don't go hand in hand. Even if I give you complete ownership over a piece of my property, it doesn't mean you can impose as me, be it with or without regards to this piece of property.
Now I have to ask, is this really so hard to understand? I'm asking because trademark issues are boring as hell and it seems that the only reason they're brought to attention is that people don't understand the simple difference mentioned above.
I am the lawn!