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There's a problem, though

Posted Feb 17, 2005 4:59 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
Parent article: A look at CentOS

If this were only a case of Red Hat enforcing its trademarks, I would have no problem with their action at all. However, their lawyer asserted that Red Hat has the right to deny people the right to link to Red Hat's web site, despite several court decisions that say just the opposite. The exact quote from the lawyergram is "Moreover, our client does not allow others to provide links to our client's web site without permission.". That's news to me; my company internal site has many links to Red Hat's sites, and we never asked for or obtained permission.

I wish Red Hat great financial success (so they can continue to pay lots of talented hackers to work on free software), but I can't tolerate people saying that you have to get permission to make a link. Ever. Red Hat should be asked to retract that statement (or blame the overzealous lawyer for going overboard, which may well be what happened).

(Log in to post comments)

Posted Feb 17, 2005 10:07 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

I agree with you, especially since they do not mention it in the
trademark guideline. In fact they seems to want to enforce a much
stricter policy than the one advertised, which is a double standard
(because obviously there are lots of instance when they _want_ to be
linked).

I hope RH will not become a lawyer-run corporation.

Linking...

Posted Feb 17, 2005 18:26 UTC (Thu) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link]

I am hoping that this is just a misunderstanding either by the lawyer or those of us reading his statements out of context.

RedHat is clearly concerned about the context of the linking. They do not want you to say that your product is identical to RedHat but without the fees. I do not think that they are saying that you cannot link to their site for any reason. Many, many sites link to RedHat and this is the first I have heard of such a policy.

Perhaps the reason that CentOS is so happy to comply with RedHat is not only the risk of legal action but also empathy towards the hand that feeds it. Finding a way to allow a community reproduction of RHEL without signifcantly impacting RedHat's bottom line is in the interest of both parties. Without RedHat there is no CentOS.

If RedHat had suddenly become as malicious as some of the net postings imply I very much doubt that SRPMS for RHEL4 would still be available to everyone. I just updated my CentOS 4 system this morning with a slew of new updates and I know that I have RedHat to thank for that as much as the CentOS team.

Linking...

Posted Feb 18, 2005 20:07 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

RedHat is clearly concerned about the context of the linking. They do not want you to say that your product is identical to RedHat but without the fees.

Sure, they're concerned, and justifiably so. But the point is that trademark law doesn't give them any right to do anything about it. Trademark law stops me from saying that my product is Red Hat; it doesn't stop me from saying it's equivalent to Red Hat.

Unless the context reaches the level of libel, I can't see any legal way Red Hat can stop someone from referring to its web site. People once thought HTML linking might be a form of copying or encouraging copying, and therefore be controlled by copyright, but courts have said otherwise.

There's a problem, though

Posted Feb 17, 2005 18:30 UTC (Thu) by kael (guest, #1599) [Link]

You forgot to mention Red Hat demanding "Red Hat" be removed from meta tags on the Centos site as well.

As a shareholder of Red Hat, I personally feel persuing this line of action against CentOS is a waste of time and money. Red Hat's value add is service and support, CentOS is certainly not offering the same class of offerings. Or so I believe with the very brief mention of commercial CentOS in the article (that would have been worth persuing).

There's a problem, though

Posted Feb 18, 2005 5:57 UTC (Fri) by dberkholz (subscriber, #23346) [Link]

It's not really about whether it's a waste of time, money or whatever. If Red Hat becomes aware of trademark violations, it _has_ to do something about it or risk losing its trademark altogether.