Trademarking the snake

Trademarking the snake

Posted Jan 4, 2007 13:33 UTC (Thu) by copsewood (subscriber, #199)
Parent article: Trademarking the snake

This article deserves some praise for thinking through a difficult issue for free software advocates. However, the reason "Nobody likes to see their chosen name hijacked, and commercial organizations can be positively paranoid about the idea" needs to be seen primarily as a benefit arising from the success of free software developments in establishing brand recognition , rather than as a threat potentially making free software less free.

At issue is the question of the quality reputation that arises in the consumers mind which is associated with a brand or mark. In the situation where, let's say, Firefox is packaged by Debian, and has to be modified in order to correspond to Debian's quality control in addition to that carried out by Mozilla, the marketing issue is about how to present the positive influence of both brands working together rather than against each other.

Perhaps one approach suitable for standardising this practice, or even sharing organisational resources to support the needs of a number of free software marks, is for those responsible for brand and mark protection in respect of free software products to go down the Linux mark route of allowing protection of derived trademarks (e.g. "Red Hat Linux") where the packager needs this protection of their own mark in connection with a mark belonging to an upstream package.

See the Linux Mark website for details. This relative success of their approach in combining strong mark protection with reasonable permission of unlicensed fair use and licensing of strong derived use where required by derived brand users seems to speak for itself. How long the current Debian unregistered mark approach would survive someone trying to steal their mark for an incompatible purpose (which did happen with the Linux mark prior to it being registered) is open to question.

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