Legally the ASF could register the trademarks for podlings, once we have the source code in our repo, but as a public charity it's not appropriate for us to do so given the cost and fact that a podling may fail to graduate[1].
Some podlings coming from companies have existing registrations, which the donor must formally transfer to the ASF before graduation; we will then maintain the registrations ourselves for that TLP. Trademark rights in the US and some countries come from use in commerce: publicly using the name or logo in association with software for download means you can use ™ on the trademark and claim it. Registering gives you other abilities, but is not required. We have a comprehensive list of trademark resources, many of which are useful for any FOSS project: https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources In particular see "How To: Request Registration of Your Project Name". - Shane [1] This is an issue of both cost and trademark ownership. Registered trademarks are legal assets; as a US non-profit 501C3 organization we can't really give assets like that away except to another 501C3 in most cases. For unregistered trademarks it doesn't much matter; if a podling fails to graduate we don't keep any claim over the trademark. Greg Stein wrote on 11/30/16 5:14 AM: > Podlings are not part of the Foundation (yet), so cannot get trademark > registrations. > > The Trademark/Brand peeps will assist with looking at the future > possibility, post-graduation. > > On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 4:00 AM, Stian Soiland-Reyes <st...@apache.org> > wrote: > >> On 30 November 2016 at 09:51, Ian Dunlop <ianwdun...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> I saw the following on trademark registrations >>> http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/register#register and wondered if >>> this was possible for incubator projects or only for those which have >>> graduated. Any ideas? >> >> I think it makes most sense for graduated projects; a podling project >> is not guaranteed to graduate from the Incubator and might choose to >> say move to a GitHub-only model. This could then require a project >> rename beyond removing "Apache", as ASF would have the trademark >> registration and there might not be a new legal entity to move the >> trademark to. >> >> But that said, I don't think there's anything stopping such a >> registration for podlings - not sure if policy-wise that would need to >> include "(incubating)", which perhaps would look odd in a trademark. >> >> >> -- >> Stian Soiland-Reyes >> http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9842-9718 >> >> --------------------------------------------------------------------- >> To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org >> For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org >> >> > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
