[IAEP] Scenarios for licensing our trademarks

[Sean DALY]

I don't think brand-building - raising awareness of what we do - is an
eithor/or proposition killing collaboration. However, I guarantee 100%
that a weak trademark policy will lead to no awareness raised. The
challenge of marketing is to get people who don't know or care about
something to do so.

Mozilla has done a fabulous job of building market share from marginal
Netscape, and a brand from zero. Just look at how Microsoft has been
steadily losing market share monthly for years. That would not have
been remotely possible without a strong brand and smart marketing (the
full-page NYT ad for the v1, a classic manifesto). I don't understand
how they have killed collaboration when they have a vibrant ecosystem
of add-ons, with a portal useful enough for adapting to the ASLO
portal.

The GNU GPL succeeded in copyright because it was well-thought-out.
What we are aiming for is a trademark policy as effective as Ray
Dolby's or Intel's, but without the cost, designed to raise awareness
where it isn't - teachers and education tech buyers.

This wouldn't be as necessary if the distros had strong brands and
could promote Sugar. However, unfortunately they don't. In our
ecosystem, the strongest brand is "the little green $100 computer with
the crank", the image most people likely have of the project. Sadly,
none of OLPC's brand equity leverages Sugar, which is always absent
from press releases, absent from the boot screen, given short shrift
on the OLPC website, etc (cf.
http://laptop.org/en/laptop/software/index.shtml with screenshots but
not even a link to the Sugar Labs website). The most fruitful
marketing collaboration Sugar could obtain would be from OLPC. In this
regard, I am hopeful that Walter's trip to Miami will improve that
impasse, there's a lot of work to do.

Sean



On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 5:42 AM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
> Quick comments : I agree with C.Scott's remarks 100%.   Being too
> strict about copyright or trademark is an easy way to kill
> collaboration in the cradle, and Mozilla's done most of this
> (including guidelines for logo modification and reuse) very well.
>
> On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 1:43 PM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at cscott.net> wrote:
>>
>> It is an automatic license, in particular:
>>
>> "It is very important that Community Releases of Firefox and
>> Thunderbird maintain (or even exceed!) the quality level people have
>> come to associate with Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. We
>> need to ensure this, but we don't want to get in people's way. So, we
>> are taking an optimistic approach.
>>
>> Official L10n teams can start using the "Firefox Community Edition"
>> and "Thunderbird Community Edition" trademarks from day one, but the
>> Mozilla Foundation may require teams to stop doing so in the future if
>> they are redistributing software with low quality and efforts to
>> remedy the situation have not succeeded. Doing things this way allows
>> us to give as much freedom to people as possible, while maintaining
>> our trademarks as a mark of quality (which we are required to do in
>> order to keep them).
>>
>> In particular, when making changes to preferences or adding in
>> extensions or plugins, we recommend that localization teams contact
>> the Mozilla Foundation in advance to discuss any quality concerns that
>> may arise. Rigorous testing of the effects of these extensions and
>> plugins is generally necessary to ensure high quality."
>> http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/l10n-policy.html
>>
>> This seemed a sane and sensible policy to me; I think it would be a
>> very reasonable approach for Sugar as well.
>>  --scott
>>
>> ps. Discussions about "ease of enforcement" should really be made in
>> conjunction with actual plans and budgets for enforcement.  In the
>> absence of any dedicated funds for legal remedy, trademark defense is
>> pretty toothless -- you're almost better off in that case maintaining
>> ignorance of violators, since non-prosecution of parties known to be
>> in violation of the trademark can cause the trademark to be removed
>> for "non-use".  In the absence of a better public citation, I'll point
>> to Wikipedia:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Maintaining_trademark_rights
>
> Right -- in the current situation where there's no active body to
> enforce, I would also think that focusing on getting as many people as
> possible to use and play with Sugar would take priority.
>
> my $0.02,
> SJ
>