Trademark license agreement status

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 10:07:20AM -0400, Pamela Chestek wrote:
> All,
>
> Sorry for the delay in response; I took ill on Wednesday and finally  
> made it back to work yesterday. Thanks for your comments, again they  
> were very helpful. I've added mine below and I've also updated the wiki  
> version of the agreement with some of the changes so you can see them in  
> the actual document.

Thanks for writing this, Pam -- it's super helpful to have this on the
list.  Just snipping out one part where I had a relevant comment to
add:

>> 2. Why is there no verbiage in the TLA that the the registrant of
>> the domain name would be reimbursed for their remaining expenses
>> (domain registration/transfer fees) if the domain is registered for X
>> amount of time and that time exceeds the life of the license?
>> I think this would foster a better relationship with the community by
>> doing so, as the expenses would be trivial to the Licensor should a
>> domain need to be turned over.
>>
> If the termination is because the licensee has materially breached the  
> agreement, it doesn't seem appropriate for Fedora to pay a breaching  
> party for the domain name. Any payment would also be out of Fedora's  
> budget, so it's their judgment on under what circumstances and what  
> amount would be appropriate. But I agree that it's probably a trivial  
> amount, so it shouldn't be a hurdle either way.

As I told a couple people in other conversations, we didn't have a
clause in the agreement with hard requirements, because it seemed kind
of complicated to put in language that would allow us to reimburse in
one situation, and allow us to not reimburse in others.

But the way I see it, if for some reason Red Hat terminated an
agreement for some reason other than breach, Fedora should reimburse a
domain owner for the balance of, say, a year's registration, up to
some maximum amount.  I don't know what that amount should be off the
top of my head, but most vendors offer registrations for < USD $25 a
year.

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