On Thursday, 5 December 2013 at 08:06:35 UTC, monarch_dodra wrote:
Having read all that though, one could argue that having "uni"
is *even worst* than "unicode", as it violates both:
a) Use the ® symbol to indicate that the Unicode Mark
b) Do not alter its spelling
I don't care much about uni vs unicode, but I think siding with
"uni" for copyright reasons is a fallacious argument.
(mind you, copyright is different from trademark!)
I didn't tell you this before, but I actually informally asked an
IP lawyer about this situation and he told me that, in general,
stating facts of the trademark is fine, as long as one is not
implying it is authorized, etc.
I think this use is not a problem, both in terms of the letter of
the law and my personal judgement of how likely it would be for
the Unicode Consortium to complain. For instance, see:
"Nominative fair use. This is when a potential infringer (or
defendant) uses the registered trademark to identify the
trademark holder's product or service in conjunction with his or
her own. To invoke this defense, the defendant must prove the
following elements:
* the product or service cannot be readily identified without the
mark
* he/she only uses as much of the mark as is necessary to
identify the goods or services
* he/she does nothing with the mark to suggest that the trademark
holder has given his approval to the defendant
"
The unicode module uses the word Unicode to refer to facts about
the Unicode Standard. If you want to, in the docs, add a few ®
symbols, use quotes around "Unicode" and "The Unicode Standard",
add a notice that the word is a trademark, etc., I think that is
fine. Stopping the use of the word Unicode in the language and
documentation because it is a trademark seems to me to be
overthinking it. This is a factual use, just don't imply that the
consortium approves anything of the D module and documentation.
The rights of a trademark owner are *not* absolute, and if
anything I'd expect them to complain about the current use of
"Unicode" in the docs (which can easily be fixed) than the use of
"unicode" in the module name (where it is reasonable not to use
the ® symbol due to technical and practical reasons). Really,
just don't overthink it. It's not like this issue would be
specific to D (Python uses "unicode", as someone said) or to
Unicode (the docs use several other trademarks, without
mentioning that they are trademarks...)
