Rick, On Thu, Sep 06, 2007 at 08:25:30AM -0700, Rick Moen wrote: > > See http://bugs.debian.org/354622 for the full story. Sorry I didn't > > include that link before, I was lazy.
> As usual for trademark claims, the complainer greatly overstates the > rights actually available to trademark owners[1]. Briefly stated, > establishing a valid trademark entitles you to prohibit others in your > same trade or profession from offering competing commercial goods or > services[2] using your mark in a way likely to confuse your customers > into thinking you have produced or endorsed the competing goods or > services. All other uses of the mark are automatically lawful.[3] I don't think that Debian disagrees with this, so I'm not sure why you seem to have reached the opposite conclusion (your implicit point seems to be that Debian is ok to ship its browser as "firefox" without permission of Mozilla). Perhaps you don't understand that it's our position that Debian and its derivers need to have the freedom to make modifications to the browser without being obligated to either get prior approval from Mozilla Corp. for each change, or rip out the trademarks and/or rename the packages and/or update all marketing materials that might mention the browser? Even if we were shipping a browser package today that was the same as the upstream product (which we aren't, because of the logo change if nothing else), it's entirely possible that in the future we would be shipping a browser functionally different from the upstream one, so it's not obvious to me that labelling such a browser "firefox" without qualifications would be acceptable nominative use of the trademark. Or perhaps you are assuming that all uses of Debian are non-commercial in nature, and therefore not subject to trademark law? I don't think this is correct either; Debian itself is non-commercial, but there are plenty of folks who distribute Debian or a derivative thereof commercially, and I think it's not unlikely for such distributors to advertise their product in terms of the applications it contains -- and if they were to say "includes Mozilla Firefox", that would run afoul of the trademark because what it contains is /not/ Mozilla Firefox, it's a modified version of firefox that Mozilla Corp. doesn't want labelled with their trademark. Finally, even if both of the above were negligible, there's still the simple fact that it's not really worth our bother to have it out with Mozilla Corp over this issue. Given the ridiculous lies that have been spouted by some in the Mozilla camp about Debian's handling of trademark issue, I can only imagine the crap we would have had to endure if we had disputed the legitimacy of their trademark claim. Honestly, if that's how Mozilla is going to treat folks in the Free Software community, is that really a brand we want to be promoting for them anyway? > The standard way to disarm any possibility of a valid trademark > infringement complaint is to (1) state who owns the trademark, and (2) > say that trademark-owning party doesn't produce or endorse one's > separate offering. Except that doesn't disarm at all in the specific case of using the trademark to label an offering of your own which is a product in the same field. > And open source people fall for it every single time -- but one. I've been on the receiving end of a trademark-related C&D before, in relation to an open source reimplementation of a popular board game. The lawyer that the game's creator had retained was, not surprisingly, quite the slimeball and grossly overstated the creator's IP claims in the matter; but the game in question was an innovative one that we enjoyed greatly, and out of a certain sense of indebtedness to the game's creator we graciously agreed to rename the software. And we are still making nominative use of the trademark on the project website, in spite of some of the lawyer's more egregious claims. :) I don't think making a calculated decision about the tradeoffs of disputing someone's trademark claim constitutes "falling for it". Cheers, -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.debian.org/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]