Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks [LWN.net]

Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

Posted Jan 10, 2005 19:46 UTC (Mon) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

"Nobody questions the validity of the "Linux" trademark"

No community members, sure, but in a court of law, things like active enforcement have real meaning. If Microsoft made a product called Microsoft Linux that, well, wasn't, Linus might find it rather hard to assert his trademark ownership when he lets all sorts of other not-strictly-Linux products and services use his trademark.

Enforcement of what?

Posted Jan 10, 2005 20:32 UTC (Mon) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

That's not my understanding.

You enforce two things. The first is that people don't make protected
use of your trademark without a license. Failing to do that will indeed
be a problem if you trademark is challenged in court -- especially by
parties which you have been making use of the mark. The other thing you
enforce are the terms of a license allowing use of the trademark. Without
a license the only allowed uses are minimal, like fair use in copyright.
However trademark law doesn't care what uses you allow in your licenses.
A generous license will not mean it is revoked, invalidated, or
considered abandoned.

Of course IANAL.

The thing we are talking about here are the license terms, not use of the
trademark without a license.

Enforcement of what?

Posted Jan 14, 2005 1:11 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

The thing we are talking about here are the license terms, not use of the trademark without a license.

It's the same thing. I don't mean it's equivalent; I mean it's technically one and the same.

The license terms tell you what you have to do in order to have the right to use the trademark. If you don't perform the terms, you don't get to use the trademark. The licensor can't force you perform the terms; he can only force you not to use the trademark if you don't (or recover damages for the unlicensed use).

Sometimes people have a separate contract in which the licensee gets a license in exchange for the licensee giving up something. In that case, the licensor could separately enforce the contract. From what I've read, that's not what Mozilla is doing.

Enforcement of what?

Posted Jan 14, 2005 5:10 UTC (Fri) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

I think we agree. My point is that we are discussing licensing terms
here. It will have no effect on the validity of their trademark to use
different terms -- a disagreement with a statement to the contrary in a
previous post. I understand that a pure license is a unilateral grant
and that enforcement won't have anything to do with breach of contract but
with trademark infringement. I see that my post can read differently but
my point (an the reason I changed the title) was to draw attention to
_what_ is being enforced: the trademark itself is unchanging and there is
nothing to debate (unless someone wants to challenge it like the Godzilla
trademark owners), on the other hand the terms given for its use can, at
least in theory, be modified.