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Open-source badgeware

Open-source badgeware

Posted Aug 2, 2007 15:33 UTC (Thu) by vmole (guest, #111)
Parent article: Open-source badgeware

...and may only be used with the permission of their owners, or under circumstances otherwise permitted by law or as expressly set out in this License.

Doesn't that explicitly allow use of the trademark in the attribution, since the attribution requirement is expressly set out in the license?


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Open-source badgeware

Posted Aug 2, 2007 19:48 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

Not necessarily. The trademark holder could have a policy that, for example, forbids use of its trademark on porn sites, or sites that link to circumvention devices. In that case, the user could get the right to use the trademark and the software by simply taking down the porn or links.

<p>If using a trademark is required to use the software, then the trademark license effectively becomes part of the software license.

Open-source badgeware

Posted Aug 4, 2007 0:00 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

I don't see how the trademark owner's policy has anything to do with it; it's what the owner actually licenses, not what it's his policy to license that matters.

But you have to go rather beyond the literal meaning of that paragraph to say it's a trademark license. The paragraph starts out "you acknowledge," which is not language that grants anything at all. It's language that takes away -- it takes away the licensee's right to argue "I thought I was getting a trademark license". The latter part of the paragraph limits the amount that the paragraph takes away, but can't semantically add anything that wasn't already there in other paragraphs.

So maybe the attribution requirement is a trademark license, and maybe the copyright license implies a trademark license because the former is useless without the latter (I personally doubt both of these), but the paragraph in question doesn't grant any trademark rights.

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