The current Trademark License Agreement is unacceptable

[Dimitris Glezos]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 8:43 PM, Paul W. Frields<stickster at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> You are not taking into account that through inaction in other places
> -- which I agree needs to be guided by respect for the issues raised
> here by community members, and addressing them wherever possible -- we
> can easily make it impossible for the Board to effectively do that.

<nod> -- This is a good argument, which I'd love to see backed up by
some more details. I've asked this before and didn't get an answer.
I'd really like to understand exactly what makes impossible for the
Board to do what, and under which circumstances. Exactly how does our
capability of enforcing the trademark to ONE BAD site change,
depending on 99 other sites which either have a signed agreement or
not?

> When our TM guidelines forbade basically *everything,* it was easy to
> just police misuse at will.  But that also meant Red Hat had much more
> unilateral and inflexible control over the trademarks, even though
> everyone seemed to ignore that glaring fact most (and maybe all) of
> the time.  Now that our TM guidelines have been overhauled and create
> many more liberal permissions, we have a more difficult (but I think
> worthwhile) job in creating a landscape where we're helping to
> safeguard the trademarks but at the same time permitting broad and
> liberal use.

My question still remains: Are these processes EFFECTIVE? Do we
protect the trademarks from the bad people, or are we just forbidding
old ladies from flying with nailclippers? Are we sure the cost we're
paying isn't worth the risk? And what is the real risk and how are we
effectively defending against it?

I'm not even sure we all agree on what the risk is. To me, the risk is
a bad person wanting to harm our trademark. This person would never
sign such a contract, and will launch the site in a country where you
can't easily enforce it.

-d


-- 
Dimitris Glezos

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