Debian Questions Trademark Policy 82
An anonymous reader writes "The OSS/developer community at large is paying more attention to the trademark issue, especially since Linus Torvalds bid to trademark the name 'Linux' in Australia failed recently. Branden Robinson, Debian's project leader, says the current trademark policy needs updating to ensure it has the appropriate level of protection against legal challenges. Robinson said there are various questions that project members must address when deciding how to change the policy. These include whether Debian Linux should have a trademark at all, and whether the trademark can be used to penalize those who 'prey upon' the community."
See Also... (Score:5, Informative)
some debian-legal [debian.org] discussion
Re:Why shouldn't they trademark their works? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Trademark (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Trademark (Score:2, Informative)
It puts the Linux world in a Catch 22. Either you argue that the mark is valid after over a decade of free use by anyone, thereby saying that you would support submarine litigation and/or licensing of the Linux name to companies that were previously using it, or you admit that the mark is invalid and nobody has the right to control it. There is no in-between on the issue.
Re:Trademark (Score:1, Informative)
Here's a link to a story about it. [commondreams.org]
Note that Apple Computers operates under a similar deal with Apple Records, and ran into some trouble with them over starting up iTunes.
Re:Trademark (Score:1, Informative)
The case never made it to trial.
Robinson's full post (Score:5, Informative)
His main point seems to be that trademarks can lead to forking, whether it be forced by the trademark holder or voluntary, and that these trademark forks can lead to confusion (Why are these forked version unofficial? Is it really the same product? Which is the 'best' version?), inefficiency (harder to share code between forks) and fragmentation of the open-source community. Moreover, the implicit threat of trademarks - play by our rules or lose the name - seems at odds with the ethos of freedom to make changes that at the core of the free software movement.
He ends with three main questions that Debian will have to resolve:
* Why even have a trademark? What protections does it give that are useful for Debian? How do these protections different internationally, within dozens of different national jurisdictions?
* What is the approval process for using the Debian trademark? Should some groups get automatic approval, or should Debian leverage its trademark to compel vendors to contact Debian?
* Can we apply the Copyleft principle to trademark? That is, how can we turn trademark on its head and make it a tool to promote the open and free use of Debian and other projects instead of a device to restrict the rights of others?
Re:Should it have a TM? Yes. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Trademark (Score:3, Informative)
With due respect, you clearly don't have the faintest clue what "generic" means.
Generic is when you use something that might be a trademark to refer to anything vaguely similar. For example, in Britain it's common to use the word "hoover" to refer to a vacuum cleaner of any brand: you have Hoover hoovers and Dyson hoovers. What that means is that "hoover" is becoming generic, and soon it might get to the point where Dyson could actually describe what they were making as hoovers, and Hoover wouldn't be able to sue them for it.
Likewise, Xerox have had to go to tremendous efforts to protect their trademark: if you stopped talking about copiers and started talking about xeroxes (of any brand), then the Xerox mark would have become generic. But we don't, we talk about copiers: so Xerox is not generic these days.
Now, is Linux generic? Of course it isn't! When you talk about Linux, you are talking about an operating system based on the Linux kernel. You wouldn't say "Microsoft Windows is a popular linux", or talk about the "FreeBSD linux", or say "OS X is based on the Mach micro-linux", because the generic term is "operating system" or "kernel", and "Linux" is the unique name for a particular kernel used to power a particular set of operating systems.
Sorry, but the Australians called it wrong this time. There may well be valid arguments against a Linux trademark, but genericity ain't one of them.
Re:Trademark (Score:3, Informative)
It's not necessarily cut and dried with Linux. It has become so widespread in so many flavors, distributions, functions and systems, that it really has taken on some generic qualities. Technically minded folks understand the difference between the kernel and the rest, but most, if not all, of the companies selling services and products for Linux do not make that distinction.
Re:Too Late... (Score:2, Informative)
I guess at one point they managed to get Trusted Debian to change their name, but then Bruce Perens immediately backpedaled with his "fair to all businesses" policy.
You've got the order very wrong there. The Trusted Debian thing happened in 2003, whereas Bruce's policy was announced in 1998.
When Bruce started his little group of people to support Debian, all hell broke loose. A third of the developers went with Bruce to carry on the tradition of separating business from OSS, a third jumped on board with Ubuntu, and the other third just sat around expecting money to fall into their laps.
What little group? The last Debian-related thing Bruce was involved in was Userlinux, which has been a miserable failure. Approximately no Debian developers were involved. A small number of Debian developers (including myself) have some level of involvement in Ubuntu. I don't think we expect to make money out of it, and it doesn't diminish my involvement in Debian. If anyone got involved in Debian in the hope of making money, then they're sadly deluded and I don't seem to have met them yet.