Trademark license agreement status

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 06:44:55PM +0200, Richard Körber wrote:
> > As I mentioned, I was checking with some colleagues on their thoughts
> > about whether it was problematic to ask for trademark symbols to be
> > used. Unfortunately no one had a clear answer.  In light of the
> > uncertainty, I would recommend to Fedora that the Trademark Guidelines
> > and the TLA (In Exhibit C) both be amended to state (borrowing the Sun
> > approach), "The '®' symbol should be placed after the first or most
> > prominent use of the FEDORA Mark and the 'TM' should appear after the
> > first or most prominent use of the Infinity design logo unless your
> > editorial convention is never to use symbols with any company's marks,
> > including your own."  Therefore, if you aren't doing it for anyone else
> > you don't have to do it for Fedora.  Note that Fedora still asks that
> > the trademark legend ("Fedora and the Infinity design logo are
> > trademarks of Red Hat, Inc.") be included, but that can be on the
> > imprint page.
> 
> Well, our conversation ended quite abruptly when Paul announced the new
> draft where the "Permitted Use" was still unchanged. It seemed like
> there was no way to address my concerns at that issue.

Not at all Richard, as I stated in that post, I was trying to collect
all of the various changes that had come up so far, and then to
continue the open conversation that had been going on.  I'm not sure
how one could interpret that as ending the conversation, but I'm sorry
I wasn't clear enough about it.  As far as Red Hat Legal and I are
concerned, this is very much still an active, open issue and we'd like
to hear where we haven't addressed your (or anyone else's) concerns.

> Anyhow, I think this will be good news for the other German Fedora sites.
> 
> > The mirroring issue has been addressed with a change to the contract,
> > available in draft here:
> 
> AFAIK Robert Scheck was having the mirroring issue.

Very true; we wanted to try and address as many concerns as have been
voiced to us in private and in public.

> > Are there any other outstanding issues?  I looked through the emails and
> > believe they've all been addressed.  Is there something I missed?
> 
> There aren't, at least for me. Knowingly breaching the Trademark
> Guidelines was what concerned me most. As I posted somewhere in a thread
> before, I think it is careless to sign a contract in the hope that parts
> of it will never be applied.

I'm not sure what this means -- where do you believe you have to rely
on hope?  If we know the answer to that, it would help us figure out
where the agreement might be unclear, so we can fix it.

Looking back, I think there may be an open question from you about
whether using trademark symbols in an imprint page would satisfy the
agreement.  Did we miss some other question that you feel hasn't been
answered?

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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