2008/11/24 Michael Bimmler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Yeah and, what Nathan probably meant: If a chapter ignores a > termination message and keeps using the trademark, we would need to > obtain an injunction in *their* country. Now, I think the Wikipedia > trademark is not even registered internationally yet (it isn't in > Switzerland, so I suppose it isn't in that many other countries > either), so we'd run into problems. As a matter of fact, the chapter > could just register the trademark in the country and unless the > foundation was willing to really put up a court fight to get the > trademark back, they could just ignore the termination notice.
That's an interesting question. What is the current trademark situation for the WMF? A trademarks committee was set up nearly 3 years ago to advise the board on what trademarks to register and where but it seems to have only lasted a few months before disbanding. There is a page on meta ("Wikimedia Trademarks") that was marked as historical over a year ago on which Angela said the details of the trademarks were confidential, but that doesn't sound right - how can a registered trademark be confidential? Doesn't it need to be public knowledge in order to serve a purpose? The main reasons I can see in old discussions for not registering everything and everywhere was that it's expensive and time consuming, but we have a much larger budget now (the discussions say the registration fee is $400 a time for the US, which was a lot of money for the foundation 2 or 3 years ago, it isn't now) and a full time staff (including a general counsel) which it didn't have when the committee was set up. It would seem we can reasonably register (and even, if necessary, defend) all our major trademarks in at least those countries where we have significant activity (in terms of readership, more than anything), so has this been done? _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l