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

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Mon, 2006-02-27 at 09:41 -0500, Dominic Lachowicz wrote:
> On 2/27/06, Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman sun com> wrote:
> >
> > Perhaps - this has been discussed on the Board for years.  As I
> > understand it, the guidance from legal consultations so far has not
> > helped sketch out such a guideline, and I was under the impression that
> > there is little, if any, legal precedent for such implicit licensing.
> 
> If we want to avoid the "implicitness" bit, perhaps we could have some
> sort of secure webapp that clearly defines the TOCs of such a TM
> policy, delineating the rights and limitations one has when using the
> Foundation's marks. By filling in your relevant information and
> clicking "accept", an explicit contract between the foundation and you
> - the licensee - has been formed. The licensee is bound by the
> contract, and may use the TMs in a way that is consistent with said
> contract. The Foundation still gets to enforce and protect its mark,
> while still being fairly liberal with who gets to use it.
> 
> Under such a policy, no warm-bodies would be involved past the initial
> setup stages, unless people were found to be infringing the TM or
> violating the TOCs of the contract.

The user-group agreement is currently done as an electronic
click-through.

 http://foundation.gnome.org/licensing/usergroup/

I'm not sure that going over https would make it any more legally
binding...

					Owen