The current Trademark License Agreement is unacceptable

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 10:12 AM, inode0<inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> The use of Fedora trademarks without permission is granted in various
> cases in the Trademark Guidelines. Is it not possible to craft a use
> case here that would fall into that category and sufficiently cover
> Red Hat's needs while not being a worrisome burden on our
> contributors?

Can you come up with an exhaustive and prescriptive definition of all
categories of misuse that could be agreed on?  I don't think you can.
There is an inherent fuzziness with regard to what is and is not
confusing usage..as a lot of it is in the context of how a mark is
used and the intent thereof. We maybe able to easily write down a
short list of activities we want to see the mark used for...but we
aren't going to be able to prescriptively list everything that
constitutes misuse...because misuse can and will be contextually.

All this really boils down to whether or not its reasonable for a
rights holder to be able to make the judgement as to what misuse is
after the license is in place.  Since an exhaustive definition of
everything that encompasses all potential misuse is not available..I
think its perfectly reasonable to expect a rights holder to keep the
right to make that judgement as part of the decision process leading
to license termination. Now there maybe a better way to word the
termination clause to make it more palatable but I very much doubt the
legal import of the clause will materially change.

-jef