On Tue, 20 Aug 2013 23:22:43 +0100 "luke.leighton" <[email protected]> wrote:
> i see your point. one might reasonably claim that by including the > trademarks - and distributing them under the GPL - that canonical has > GPL-licensed those words. thus it cannot therefore impose > restrictions without itself losing rights under the GPL [and likewise > neither can redhat. dang. how long has it been before anybody even > noticed this, bruce?? :) ] Trademarks and copyrights are different laws, so I guess(I'm not a lawyer) that it's possible to do both and be consistent with the law and the GPL. I read(I don't remember well where, but I could check the facts out if needed) that the trademarks law were meant to protect the "consumers". So I guess that if somebody takes an image licensed under a Free Software license like the GPL or some licenses more widely used for images such as the CC-by-sa, and modify it in a way that doesn't mislead the people, I guess it would be consistent with such restriction, the law, and the Free Software license used for the image. I also guess that creating a misleading image from scratch(for instance by not using the one released under a Free Software license as a starting point), would really be problematic under the trademarks law, and would not follow such restriction. The fact that Ubuntu uses the "Intellectual property" word make it easier to confuse trademarks, copyright, and patents... Theses are 3 different laws that applies to different issues that are not related. Applying some conception that applies to one of theses law usually don't work on the 2 others. There are more details on that issue here [1]. Anyway I really wonder why Ubuntu uses that word. I hope that their goal is not to make the users, developers and/or distributors confused. References: [1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html Denis.
