This is not a good trend [LWN.net]

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 2, 2025 20:55 UTC (Sun) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: This is not a good trend by dvdeug
Parent article: Fedora discusses Flatpak priorities

> "Reverse passing off"--the act of stripping the trademarks off and releasing it under your trademarks--can get you sued just like trademark infringement. It's illegal at least in the US and India.

No, it is not illegal in the US. Fox tried to litigate this exact issue many decades ago, and SCOTUS slapped them down. See https://www.oyez.org/cases/2002/02-428

(In that case, the original was in the public domain - but SCOTUS did not stop there, and instead made a blanket ruling that "reverse passing off" is only a thing for physical goods, so you certainly can't apply it to intangible software.)

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This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 2, 2025 23:37 UTC (Sun) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

Before anyone misinterprets my comment and insists that I must be wrong, I will clarify: I am talking about trademark law. You still have independent obligations under copyright law.

In the case of the GPL (and most FOSS licenses), there is indeed a requirement to preserve the copyright notice. But a copyright notice is a single line, usually at the top of LICENSE.txt (or COPYING.txt, or whatever your FOSS project decided to call it), that names the author(s) of the software. Hardly anyone ever looks at it, except incidentally when they're trying to check what license is applicable. The name and branding of the product is an entirely different thing altogether, and no FOSS license (that I have ever heard of) explicitly requires you to preserve such branding.

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 3, 2025 9:44 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

That GPL clause that was pointed out to me elsewhere in this article basically described trademarks and it seems pretty clear to me - whether you are allowed or required to remove distinguishing marks is at the mark-owner's discretion. As explicitly stated in the GPL itself.

Cheers,
Wol