requesting a trademark license for our community

[Kambiz Aghaiepour]

Paul W. Frields wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 04:12:48PM -0500, Paul Frields wrote:
>> On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 6:04 PM, Mostafa Daneshvar
>> <mostafa.daneshvar at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Dear Board;
>>> We, as Iranian community, want your permission to use
>>> "fedoraproject.ir".One of our members registered it without considering
>>> related regulations mentioned in
>>> "http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal/".
>>> within these few months this community attracted a lot of users,nearly
>>> 510 registered. According to logs our   website approximately has 5000
>>> pages view each day. Our forum has 5500 posts (up to now).
>>> Considering our efforts within this time, we need your license to
>>> continue our efforts. We need to grant us to use Fedora logo in our
>>> website.
>>>
>>> We should be thankful for your immediate response
>> Thank you for you email -- we're looking into this now, and will get
>> back to you as soon as we can.
> 
> 
> As you may know, US federal law currently places sweeping restrictions
> on US citizens' and corporations' ability to transact with certain
> people, organizations, and nations.  The list of embargoed nations
> includes Cuba, Iran, Libya, and North Korea, among others.
> 
> The "Fedora" trademarks are regsitered worldwide to Red Hat, Inc.,
> which administers them on behalf of the Fedora community.  Because Red
> Hat is a US-based company, it must adhere to the restrictions imposed
> by US law.  Therefore, we cannot grant a trademark license for the use
> of "Fedora" in your domain name, nor for use of the Fedora logo or
> other trademarks.
> 
> I noted from your email that one of your community members registered
> the "fedoraproject.ir" domain.  I'll send you a further email to
> discuss this issue.
> 
> I sincerely regret not being able to accommodate your request.
> 
> 
> Paul W. Frields
> Fedora Project Leader

Paul,

Would it be possible to sidestep this issue entirely in the following
way, and I certain am not making this suggestion as a way of
circumventing the US regulations, nor do I want to get into a
philosophical discussion about the merits of the US position with
respect to transactions with embargoed nations.

There are a number of Farsi speaking people around the world who are
very interested in using and promoting of Fedora Linux.  Farsi as you
know is a language that is written and spoken in Iran and parts of
Afghanistan as well as many ex-patriots from these countries who now
live in many different parts of the world (US, Canada, many countries in
Europe, etc).  Would Red Hat be willing to assist in the building up of
the Farsi speaking linux community and create the
"farsi.fedoracommunity.org" DNS record and point this site to a US
hosted server?

Let me know if you think this would create any legal difficulties for
Red Hat.

Thanks
Kambiz

-- 
"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies,
but the silence of our friends."  --MLK