The current Trademark License Agreement is unacceptable

[Dimitris Glezos]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 7:29 PM, Stephen John Smoogen<smooge at gmail.com> wrote:
> Can you tell them to get professional advice versus asking on a mailing list?

I'll be very sad if we conclude that we want to foster a community in
which a member will need professional legal advice to start a fan
site. Such an energy stopper..

Also -- one of the most often mistakes in globalization is assuming
that certain local 'habits' and 'idioms' apply to everyone. In this
case, I noticed a lot of assumptions about other countries' legal
habits. We should consider various things before globalizing this
agreement document: Is it common in other countries to ask a lawyer
before you sign a document? Do lawyers really know how to "handle"
this document (does the lawyer speak English at all? Does he
understand the fine details? Do the points in the document actually
apply in the local law?) Can these documents actually be signed (eg.
underage fans creating sites)? Are we sure this request isn't even
*insulting* people in certain countries?

> 1) Translations of legal documents are not used because they may not
> convey things properly in the language or legally binding aspects of
> that country. Its why the GPL had all the disclaimers about the
> English version being the only legal version and the translations may
> be wrong and not to be trusted.

That's why this process isn't called "translation", but
"localization". Part of it is adapting the document to the local law.
Because in a lot of cases, the original version isn't even applicable.
And that's why Creative Commons has actively ported their licenses in
more than 50 countries.

I'm sure that trademark law is more or less international by now. I'm
not sure the assumptions behind our actions in enforcing our trademark
are.

My suggestion is to trust our users by default. To catch bad guys,
create monitors (eg. local community champions) that can detect when a
site does bad things. The Board at that point can send this person a
letter to hand off the domain. As we did all this time, quite
successfully.

-d


-- 
Dimitris Glezos

Transifex: The Multilingual Publishing Revolution
http://www.transifex.net/ -- http://www.indifex.com/