[IAEP] Scenarios for licensing our trademarks

[Samuel Klein]

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