trademark is not supposed to be used to suppress criticism

Posted Sep 2, 2009 2:29 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
In reply to: trademark is not supposed to be used to suppress criticism by dlang
Parent article: Fedora's trademark license agreement

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.