Re: gnome-logos package

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On 12/17/05, Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com> wrote:
> IANAL (yet), but... under US trademark law (and most European
> trademark law, as I understand it) basically all users of the mark
> must ask us for permission before use. We cannot adopt a permission
> scheme which allows any use of the logo which might be confusing to
> consumers without our permission. So this basically rules out any sane
> community-oriented permissioning scheme. I go into that in some more
> detail in the paper i linked in the blog post, if you have more time
> to read it.
>
> Trademark law doesn't give us the flexibility we want, which leaves us
> with options (as I see it) that are basically:
>
> * pursue the Mozilla route (strong trademark), which I feel will
> alienate our contributors and completely violate the implied social
> contract which the GPL has created around our shared community goods
> (i.e., compare/contrast how we license our code and the foot- which
> should be more important? why would we choose to license one more
> liberally than the other?)

In the interests of fairness, I should elucidate the strengths of this
approach more clearly. These are the key reasons the board (aside from
me) mostly leans towards our current strategy:

* substantially less risk. We completely avoid the risk of something
like the Debian Core Consortium happening to us. Either of the other
two strategies leave us with some tools to reduce risk (untested legal
strategy in the second suggestion, moral coercion in the third) but
they are not as strong.

* more control over our messaging- we (mainly the board, or a
hypothetical trademark committee) has strong control over who uses our
stuff, so we can ensure that if the foot is used, it is used in a
manner that most positively presents the foot, using our marketing
strategy, our phrasing, hypothetically our color scheme, etc.

I think there is one more, but I can't think of it off the top of my
head- brain still fuzzy from a cold.

Luis


> * collaborate with our lawyers to create and pursue a completely
> novel/untested/potentially completely undefensible license that uses a
> novel legal approach to give the community flexible rights without (I
> have approached one other free software group about collaborating
> along these lines but it hasn't really gone anywhere, unfortunately)
>
> * give up the legally enforceable mark and use a political party
> approach- accept that there will be some uses we don't like and can't
> control, but use the mechanisms of party (speech, platform creation,
> etc.) to control the mark as much as possible outside of traditional
> trademark law.
>
> HTH-
> Luis
>
> > En/na Ray Strode ha escrit:
> >
> > > The reason I'm bringing this up is because gnome-screensaver has
> > > recently gained a "floaters" screensaver that depends on having  a
> > > scalable version of the gnome-foot logo.
> >
> > --
> > Quim Gil - http://desdeamericaconamor.org
> >
> >
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