Adam Bolte <abo...@systemsaviour.com> writes: > On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 12:23:08PM +1000, Ben Finney wrote: > > Here is an excerpt from my response > > Just an excerpt? :)
Yes, I excerpted only the part of general software-freedom interest (beyond the specific query that started the thread at the ‘debian-legal’ forum). I linked to the complete post if you'd like to see the rest of it. > It depends on what compromises the trademark owner is able/prepared to > make. My gut feeling is that if the trademarks do not permit > modification and redistribution in such a way that there is no longer > any clear association with the original trademark, they belong in > non-free - if anywhere. Right. The conflict, of course, is that this completely undermines the purpose of trademark. Specifically, the purpose of preventing uses of the mark that would mislead consumers about the provenance of a product. That purpose of trademark is, in my view, of benefit to society. Yet full software freedom of the recipient is *also* of benefit to society. > However, I believe some trademarks only allow permission to be applied > when an application has not been patched or modified in any way. Some allow a limited set of modifications: only modifications necessary to incorporate the work into a larger project, for example. These still forbid modifications that alter the functionality of a program. > This could have the effect of compromising the four freedoms! That is, on the face of it, a contradiction of two opposing purposes. I hope that it can be resolved without too much compromise of either purpose. > Any trademark that makes its way into a package, where the trademark > restricts how the four freedoms (and DFSG) apply to the program - > should also be rejected from the main repository outright. Right, that's clearly what Debian needs to do. But that doesn't solve the problem, it just makes the problem someone else's — and I think it is germane to society's freedom that the problem be resolved, not merely punted. > As you might have guessed, I'm not a fan of trademarks in free > software, for the reasons you have already pointed out. I think that trademark has a significant benefit to society, which is to limit the tendencies of vendors to misrepresent their modified works as though being whatever the customer is looking for — even if that vendor has made incompatible or undesirable changes which are contradictory to what the customer would expect from the brand. Some copyright licenses attempt to clumsily use copyright law to do this, e.g. the 3-clause BSD license has as a condition that no-one may use the name of the copyright holder to “endorse or promote” the redistributed work. Other copyright licenses have explicit permission to combine the copyright license's terms with trademark terms that restrict the use of marks, e.g. the GPLv3. But those either ignore or punt the issue to trademark. The question still remains: what restrictions on the freedom of any recipient are acceptable in exchange for preventing the societal harms trademark law is designed to address? -- \ “If [a technology company] has confidence in their future | `\ ability to innovate, the importance they place on protecting | _o__) their past innovations really should decline.” —Gary Barnett | Ben Finney _______________________________________________ Free-software-melb mailing list Free-software-melb@lists.softwarefreedom.com.au http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb Free Software Melbourne home page: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/
