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Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarksDebian and Mozilla - a study in trademarksPosted Jan 10, 2005 18:37 UTC (Mon) by corbet (editor, #1)In reply to: Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks by kfox Parent article: Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks 1) Nobody questions the validity of the "Linux" trademark, despite a much more relaxed attitude regarding what can be called "Linux." 2) "Debian Thunderbird" would be an acceptible name under the "community" trademark rules. But those rules still have a lot of restrictions, as described in the article.
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Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks Posted Jan 10, 2005 19:46 UTC (Mon) by elanthis (subscriber, #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
Of course IANAL.
The thing we are talking about here are the license terms, not use of the
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 termshere. 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.
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