On Tue, Oct 12, 2004 at 05:03:30PM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote: > account; I agree that it should have. I don't have much experience with > designing trademark licenses, as you can tell. Having a trademark license ... > Why don't we simply start with a permissive copyright license, > and a statement like this: > > "This copyright license does not grant a trademark license. > > "The Debian Open Use Logo is a trademark of the Debian Project. The Debian > Project is still trying to decide on trademark policy. We hope we will > have a better trademark license for you soon. In the meantime, the Debian > Open Use Logo trademark may be used by anyone to refer to the Debian > project, but does not indicate endorsement by the project. Anyone is, of > course, also permitted to use the logo in any way which conforms to the > copyright license and does not infringe on Debian's trademark rights."
You're talking about trademark rights here, rather than copyright rights, so calling that a copyright license, and claiming that it doesn't grant trademark rights seems somewhat useless. Also, it's not clear to me that trademarks are copyrightable works. Anyone already has permission to use a trademark in any context -- indeed, in arbitrarily copyrighted works -- as long as they use it to correctly identify what it's supposed to identify. I don't see any serious reason to try to pretend otherwise. -- Raul
