Trademarks and domains [LWN.net]

Trademarks and domains

Posted Mar 15, 2022 17:19 UTC (Tue) by josh (subscriber, #17465)
In reply to: Red Hat fails to take WeMakeFedora.org by brunowolff
Parent article: Red Hat fails to take WeMakeFedora.org

I do, in general, think that it should be possible to use a trademark to name an entity you're describing or criticizing.

It'd be very different if this were `wehatefedora` or `whatswrongwithfedora` or `fedorasucks`. But the domain name here *sounds* like it could be part of the Fedora community, which is misleading. And the finding *did* agree it was confusingly similar.

It seems like a primary consideration here was that Fedora in fact has guidelines that permit the use of the trademark in some circumstances, and that caused the problem here.

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Trademarks and domains

Posted Mar 15, 2022 17:56 UTC (Tue) by brunowolff (guest, #71160) [Link]

You can't tell if it is a trademark infringement without considering the whole site. A potentially confusing domain name might be part of that, but that doesn't make the domain itself infringing, so that a trademark owner can take it. Red Hat doesn't own all uses of the word fedora in domain names and should not be able to sieze a domain using wemakefedora. The proper remedy is an injunction on the site and making similar sites in the future (assuming a violation is found).
If trademark owners wanted their own play area they should have asked ICANN to create a .trademark domain (tm is a country code) instead of convincing ICANN to created an unfairly (IMO) biased UDRP.