Re: GNOME Merchandise Process



Hi,

Brian Cameron wrote:
In fact, the above Wiki pages seem very out of date and do not reflect
much information about current merchandising work we do, such as with
Hackerthreads.

The problem with Hackerthreads is that the agreement dates from 2000 or
2001, and we have not been able to find any written agreement or record
of one after our last executive director left.

(FoundationBoard/MerchandisingAgreement is a restricted page, by the way)

Don't forget KillerMundi produce merchandising too - I don't believe we
get a cut from this currently (but perhaps GNOME Hispano does?):
http://www.freewear.org/?page=list_items&org=GNOMEHispano

 On the Trademark Wiki, I can see that there are some
draft, but not "official" trademark agreement template documents.
Perhaps this is a good starting point?

In general, we've gone over this several times. The guidelines we
drafted are here: http://foundation.gnome.org/licensing/index.html

The state of play when I was on the board was:
* Referring to GNOME didn't need any trademark agreement obviously. This
and other fair use/authorised uses of the marks are listed here:
http://foundation.gnome.org/licensing/guidelines/
* Community trademark agreement sufficed for a range of uses, including
creating a website for GNOME, promoting GNOME, and creating a local user
group, but did not cover any commercial use of marks (including printing
t-shirts for resale) - but we've mostly turned a blind eye to that kind
of thing.
* Anything else needs a specific trademark licensing agreement
explicitly allowing it. Merchandising requires an agreement, for
example, as does using a custom/hacked version of the GNOME logo for
your user group. In general, this has been straightforward to handle -
the uisage is OK, we say "yes", the usage is ugly, we say "no - go here,
these guys will help you make something that looks nice", and the usage
is commercial, we say "yes, for a cut, thanks" and need a signed agreement.

You also missed this page, a very useful document:
http://live.gnome.org/BrandGuidelines

I fished out the trademark agreement we signed with that jewellery
company (in general, legal-private gnome org dealt with issues like this
- might be a good idea to keep them in the loop). Looking at
discussions, Luis Villa and James Vasile both spent time on this one.
It's attached.

If the above website could be further fleshed out
to explain how to handle other common use cases, then this would be
really helpful.  For example:

   - For personal use (a t-shirt an individual is making for themselves)
   - For an event (logos on event merchandise)

I think it's reasonable for someone in the foundation to verify quality
when it comes to the brand, and veto t-shirt printing if they're ugly
t-shirts. In general, though, I'd be happy to modify the user group
agreement to say that creating merchandise for events for non-commercial
purposes is OK, if you have the quality of work OKed. In short, you can
sell t-shirts to recoup costs, but not to make money, if you're a user
group. And the user group agreement should then also cover the
individual/personal use case too.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org

Attachment: gnome-trademark-agreement_jan_08.odt
Description: application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text



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