Ubuntu Community Council statement on Canonical package licensing

I find it very hard to see how Canonical could argue that Mint is causing confusion in the market place. The technical specifics as to what repository individual packages come from...don't matter from a trademark confusion standpoint.

That's not to say that Ubuntu as a project couldn't do a better job of making it easier for derivatives who want to reuse binary builds coming out of the the Ubuntu build system without accidentally tripping over a trademark. Ubuntu could do like fedora does, and put all the protected trademarked material into a single package and make that package specifically conflict with a generic version of the package without the protected content. That way downstream distributors, acting in good faith, who are mixing binary packages from multiple repositories (including the Ubuntu repos), could deliberately exclude that one package from the Ubuntu repo, with all the trademark junk, in their client configuration.

When you publicly mirror your aggregate repository of open source licensed software, you should anticipate the existence of downstream derivatives who remix that binary software with other binary content into a new binary derivative. The cleanest way to do that, that minimizes the need for lawyer action, is to isolate the trademark protected items and put them into a single package in the aggregate repository and police the re-use of that one package and provide instructions and tooling to help derivative makers from accidentally pulling in that one package. Spreading trademarked material through the archive, just causes problems for everyone... including the main project..because then they have to pay for more lawyers to police the more complicated packaging situation.