trademark is not supposed to be used to suppress criticism

Posted Sep 1, 2009 22:39 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313)
Parent article: Fedora's trademark license agreement

trademark is not supposed to be used to suppress criticism, it's supposed to prevent confusion among consumers due to people falsely claiming to be associated with the protected trademark

so the reasoning that they need to be able to take over domains to protect themselves from someone changing a pro-fedora site into an anti-fedora site isn't reasonable

trademark is not supposed to be used to suppress criticism

Posted Sep 2, 2009 0:07 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (9 responses)

I don't think they have that aim in mind. I suspect the case they have in mind involves the kind of spammers who pick up an expired domain and stick ads or other garbage on it, for instance.

trademark is not supposed to be used to suppress criticism

Posted Sep 2, 2009 0:17 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (8 responses)

from the article:

It would be exceptionally damaging to the Fedora Project if a domain name that was previously used for the betterment of the project fell into the hands of wrongdoers and was used in a way harmful to Fedora. It would even be damaging if people were used to visiting a particular site for Fedora info but that site just wasn't there anymore, because we would have lost touch with community members and they might think less of Fedora because of it. It's just not in the best interest of the Fedora Project to let that happen.

I'll try to re-word my statement

the purpose of trademark isn't to prevent people thinking less of the fedora project, it's to prevent people from claiming to be/represent the fedora project.

as an example, there have been linux news sites that were sold, and the new owners started running news stories critical of linux. trandmark law has not been used to shut those sites down. the statement above seems to indicate that if this happened to a fedora news site, they want to be able to silence it.

trademark is not supposed to be used to suppress criticism

Posted Sep 2, 2009 2:29 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (3 responses)

I think you are applying your own very out of context definition to the term "damaging" in order to make a strawman argument when you clearly know that such a situation is not what trademark protection concerns itself with. There has been no discussion about using trademark rights to stifle discussion(positive or negative) when the discussion is really about Fedora. You may not be aware of this..but negative criticism can be a "betterment" to a project.

To make the suggestion that dissenting opinions would be stifled via trademark policy is moderately insulting. There's no way that would hold up in court. And besides, there would be absolute hell to pay in terms of a contributor backlash inside the Fedora project if that sort of censorship was ever attempted.

The "damage" in the context of trademark policy is about confusion of the mark with creative works and services not created or maintained by the Fedora Project. Reading anything into the word "damage" beyond that is unwarranted and inappropriate. If someone wants to write pages and pages in a scathing article about the deficiencies in the Fedora Project..and can use the trademarks in a non-confusing way in the article... they'll still be able to.

-jef

trademark is not supposed to be used to suppress criticism

Posted Sep 2, 2009 8:15 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

damaging in trademark terms would be someone creating a new distro, calling it 'fedora', and filling it with spyware (or just making it not work)

having a website that formerly hosted news about the real fedora distro go offline because the person who had been writing it moved to a different distro should not be, but this is explictly called out as one of the things they want to be able to defend against by taking over someone else's domain.

if they consider a new site going dark to be 'damaging' to the project, I don't see how they could consider a news site that started bashing them to not be.

trademark is not supposed to be used to suppress criticism

Posted Sep 2, 2009 9:03 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

What about if a well known end user facing site goes offline and gets purchased by a third party and used for porn? If it a site simply goes offline, it is much less of a problem.

Watching the domains

Posted Sep 2, 2009 19:58 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

Someone at Red Hat would have to set up a cron job to run Rick Moen's domain-check script, then take action if a Fedora-related site is about to lose its domain.

trademark is not supposed to be used to suppress criticism

Posted Sep 4, 2009 5:38 UTC (Fri) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (3 responses)

And why would these hypothetical fedora haters want to post their opinions on a domain that formerly belonged to the fedora project, out of all the domains on the internet? The only reason I can see is that they wanted to take advantage of the association of that domain with the official fedora project, and preventing that seems like a classic legitimate use of trademark. It's not like telling them they have to find their *own* place to post is really going to stop anyone from expressing themselves...

trademark is not supposed to be used to suppress criticism

Posted Sep 4, 2009 20:36 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

it only 'formerly belonged to the fedora project' if you also believe that lwn.net belongs to Linus because he owns the trademark for Linux and lwn.net posts news about linux.

trademark is not supposed to be used to suppress criticism

Posted Sep 4, 2009 21:50 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

The only reason I can see is that they wanted to take advantage of the association of that domain with the official fedora project, and preventing that seems like a classic legitimate use of trademark.

No, preventing people from taking advantage of the trademark holder's reputation is not a classic legitimate use of trademark. It's about what the customer, and incidentally the trademark holder, loses, not what the user of the trademark gains.

A Fedora hater would want to take over a formerly pro-Fedora domain name in order to gain an audience of people to be turned against Fedora. Trademark doesn't care about that. If it's perfectly clear to visitors to the site that it is not a product of the Fedora project, trademark has nothing to say about it.

The classic trademark application is where you sell your inferior cola under the name Coca Cola and thereby cheat the drinker. Incidentally, you also deprive the Coca Cola corporation of profit, so Coca Cola would take the lead in stopping you.

trademark is not supposed to be used to suppress criticism

Posted Sep 5, 2009 0:33 UTC (Sat) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

> Trademark doesn't care about that. If it's perfectly clear to visitors to the site that it is not a product of the Fedora project, trademark has nothing to say about it.

Sure, but when trademark has nothing to say, then the trademark license agreement is irrelevant.