Doug MacEachern wrote:
>
> On Mon, 1 Nov 1999, Kent, Mr. John wrote:
>
> > Doug,
> >
> > I asked O'Reilly's permission to use the "camel and feather" without
> > acknowledging them, and they said NO, see letter below from Edie Freedman.
>
> gad, I hate politics. Tim O'Reilly gave us permission to use the camel in
> the mod_perl logo two years ago. I'm can't remember if that means every
> site that uses the logo also needs to include the permission text like
> perl.apache.org does.
>
> > I say mod-perl needs to adopt a non-proprietary logo. Wasn't
> > there a page somewhere that had competing designs? Perhaps
> > I can use one of them.
>
This kind of stuff is awful. They own the image, so you
have to ask them each time you want to use it.
But here's the rub... perl & the camel are synonymous,
and they don't own perl, just the camel. Just like Kleenex
became generic, one would be able to argue that the camel
is a generic image for perl, used just about everywhere,
in fact one can't really express a perl project w/o the
camel image because of how generic it has become. The camel
is not O'Reilly after all, it is perl, and perl is owned
by the world. Because O'Reilley has not gone to any lengths
to separate the camel from perl, the camel is perl.
A commercial entity would have to use the above argument to
use the camel to market its own perl products, books, etc.
But what about an open source project, or a web site
that happened to use perl ? It would be hard for O'Reilly
to argue damages, because there are no revenues relating
to perl. Further, a successful argument can be made that
open source projects, that use the logo actually benefit
O'Reilly increasing the sales of its perl books.
Back to mod_perl. I'm not convinced that a camel with
feathers sticking out of its ears is a camel. Its a
flying camel, more of a pegasus, which is not trademarked,
might be a mythical creature that you can pull out of
Arabian Nights, and represents a complementary, and
non-competing product. Worst case scenario, reflect the
camel, since the perl camels rendered today are always
facing left, or create a desert scene with a camel, sun,
and feather, which is not just a camel either, its a
desert scene.
I think the spirit of this is that if you are not
competing with O'Reilly's commercial activities
with respect to perl, then don't worry about it.
-- Joshua
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