The current Trademark License Agreement is unacceptable

[inode0]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 1:46 PM, Jeff Spaleta<jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Why should I be asked to do this? The current Trademark Guidelines
have a section titled: Usage That Does Not Require Permission. My
question above was whether one additional permitted use case could be
crafted to add to the existing list that would cover some of the area
of concern being discussed in this thread.

> 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.

This is entirely a different matter. We don't ask authors for example
to sign any agreement. We say in advance you may use our trademarks
under these conditions without further bother. Why are they, as one
example, exempted from signing an agreement to use the trademarks when
our own contributors aren't?

John