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In fact, the above Wiki pages seem very out of date and do not reflect much information about current merchandising work we do, such as with Hackerthreads.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