Re: Minutes of the Board meeting of October 29th, 2013

[Karen Sandler <karen gnome org>]

On 2013-11-29 03:20, Vincent Untz wrote:
> Hi Karen,
>
> Le mardi 26 novembre 2013, à 00:47 -0500, Karen Sandler a écrit :
> As a lawyer I want to point out that the main thing about our trademark 
> is
> to make sure that users (under the law: consumers) aren't confused 
> about
> what comes from GNOME and what doesn't. This is extremely helpful when 
> you
> have real jerks who try to distribute software that isn't GNOME or free
> software but use our name and logo to fool people into downloading it.I
> have seen some really bizarre uses of our logo and to my knowledge we 
> have
> only enforced when we think the use is confusing. As was also pointed 
> out
> by someone else, we've had many friendly discussions that have resulted 
> in
> better uses of the marks for all.
>
> Do you have some concrete examples of confusing/misleading uses of our
> logo where we had to enforce our trademark?

Sure! There was an android app that was using our logo as their icon. 
They had nothing to do with GNOME. They just changed their logo/icon 
when we asked them to in a friendly way (after a little bit of follow 
up).  There was a software consultant that was using our logo on his 
webpage (and he was not working on GNOME). There are others (and a 
couple I have outstanding to follow up on) but those are the ones that 
occur to me now as obviously confusing use of our trademark in software.

> It's been obviously quite some time, but from my years in the board, I
> only remember misuses that were actually not in the software field, and
> I wonder if things are the same or if it got worse.

There are still a lot of uses that are not in the software field, but 
often in these cases when the logo has been modified, because it's not 
related to software that often is ok as no one would be confused. Like 
the time that someone used our logo for a fish pedicure business, 
turning the base of the foot into a fish :) (I loved that, as its the 
perfect example of how it's beneficial to license the copyright of a 
logo freely even as you exert trademark restrictions over it, something 
that's hard for trademark lawyers to grasp).

> Also, how do we define the right balance? In the Ubuntu GNOME example, 
> I
> would consider the project to be both part of the Ubuntu and GNOME
> communities, so imho, it should be entitled to use our trademark.

I think they should definitely be able to use the mark. I still think 
the right thing to do is to talk to them to find the best use of it for 
both projects. We did the same thing in a friendly way with Debian, 
even, as well as with events related to GNOME. Obviously we feel great 
about the activities and the use of the mark in principal. I don't think 
that this is a big problem. Because Ubuntu is not the GNOME Foundation, 
if the use is outside our 3rd party trademark guidelines (which again, I 
think can be improved), we either need to grant them special permission 
or ask them to change it to be consistent with our guidelines and 
continue to establish a legal record of regular defense. I would expect 
them to want to talk to us about what works as well (for example,it was 
awesome that they consulted us about what name they should use). This 
shouldn't be an adversarial thing at all.

karen