Re: gnome-logos package

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On 12/17/05, Quim Gil <qgil desdeamericaconamor org> wrote:
> About Ray's package and Luis Villa's post:
> http://tieguy.org/blog/index.cgi/524
>
> I think the Foundation needs official logos owned by the Foundation to
> be used by the official GNOME projects in order to give consistancy to
> the GNOME brand.
>
> But I also think that we should make a more extensive use of the right
> to implement authorised modifications stated in
> http://live.gnome.org/LogoGuidelines . For instance, the GUADEC needs a
> logo, the foot is a good starting point but the word "GNOME" conflicts
> with "GUADEC", and a designer will have a hard time to come up with a
> cool proposal that fully keeps the original logo.
>
> And I definitely think we should encourage the community to express
> themselves with logo variations that will be clearly unnofficial but
> respected by the Foundation unless we find they are offensive or
> something, and then "we'll lart you publicly" (if you deserve it).
>
> I'm not sure about the legal implications of this (is this a "lesser"
> trademark license?), but from a marketing perspective sounds like the
> consistant and useful way to proceed.

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?)

* 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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