trademark [was Re: Minutes of the Board meeting 2006/Feb/15]

["Luis Villa" <luis villa gmail com>]

On 2/27/06, Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman sun com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-02-27 at 13:48, Dave Neary wrote:
> ...
> > I think it'd be a good idea to get a proper legal opinion on defending our
> > marks, and setting up our trademark policy to be as liberal as possible without
> > losing them.
>
> I agree.  I thought this had already happened, and the lawyers had
> replied "we don't know", approximately.  Perhaps I am remembering
> incorrectly - who was it who has spoken to legal counsel about this so
> far?

Tim handled all our prior correspondence with counsel on this issue.
As far as I can tell, he did not push the counsel[1] to be in any way
creative with the policy, so (again, as far as we could tell) the
answer wasn't 'we don't know'- the question was never asked. I've been
researching the problem on and off since the summer, and I have
contacted the clinical program at my employer[2] about the problem.
Their involvement isn't set in stone yet, but the folks at the program
are deeply intrigued the challenge of forming a non-traditional but
still legally solid trademark policy for us. I hope that they'll be
able to work with us to pursue something along the lines of what Dom
suggested elsewhere in the thread- clearly delineating what does and
doesn't need permission in such a way that we can still protect the
mark but give maximum permissiveness to members of our community who
wish to be creative in spreading the word about GNOME.

Luis

[1] from Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich. I'm trying to schedule a meeting
with them to review exactly what has and hasn't happened, but our
contact there is traveling so it has been difficult.

[2] http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/clinical