[IAEP] [SLOBS] [SLOBs] Scenarios for licensing our trademarks

[Sean DALY]

That's true in the absolute, but we don't have a team with deep
pockets like Mozilla legal or Red Hat legal - we have pro bono
volunteers at the SFC, and they are not numerous. That's why it's
better to have careful protection upfront.

Litigation is extremely wasteful and distracting in time and
resources. We haven't even been able to go after the sugarlabs.eu
squatter yet.

Sean


On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 7:28 PM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at cscott.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 10:44 AM, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
>> That works fine with honest folk, but what about the company that
>> wishes to use the marks aggressively, as a selling point, without
>> providing any support? Or the person who promises to respect GPL and
>> CC licenses, then turns around and adds Flash binaries to a Sugar
>> image? Or the guy who claims he sent in an e-mail and never did, uses
>> the marks and tells the press we never answer our e-mail? It's because
>> not everyone is well-intentioned (unfortunately) that we need to
>> explicitly grant a revocable license through direct contact, for a
>> defined period wiith a renewal mechanism.
>
> This is what lawyers are for.  If you can't enforce the conditions,
> then you really can't defend your trademark.  This is completely
> orthogonal to the question of whether the trademark grant is automatic
> upon compliance with the conditions, or requires express written
> approval.
>  --scott
>
> --
>                         ( http://cscott.net/ )
>