Anthony wrote: The difference is in righting an actual wrong. The guy wrote a book telling people how to use Wikipedia well. That's awesome, and we should encourage that. He did nothing wrong, and the notion that merely mentioning the name Wikipedia entitles us to take his work from him is ridiculous. Trademarks are there to prevent parasites from tricking consumers into buying things under false pretenses. If the cover featured our logo, claimed that it was an official Wikipedia guide, and had a fake approved-by-Jimmy-Wales graphic, that would be a problem. But this is part of a recognizable series, is obviously branded as an O'Reilly book, and makes no claim to be associated with us. There is no problem here. We should be sending the guy flowers and candy, not serving legal papers. William -- William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri

Anthony wrote: Sorry. Is the following better? The notion that we are entitled to take his work from him merely for mentioning the name Wikipedia in the title of his book about Wikipedia is ridiculous. That's what I meant. I figured you knew that I was speaking of your claim, but I guess somebody could have gotten confused somehow. Ah. Oh. I see. You do recognize that this is an opinion so far out of the mainstream that to have the Wikimedia Foundation follow it, especially to the extent of suing people over how they title their books, would be a major PR disaster, right? William -- William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri

On 10/21/07, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote: If someone called their encyclopedia "Wikipedia Premium Edition" without permission, they would be *lying* to people and trying to trick them into thinking that it was an official version of wikipedia. It is, I think, ethical to use legal means to stop people lying about whether we (in particular, the foundation) support their product. But that's not the case, here. I doubt that people will assume that the book in question was a product of the foundation, and I suspect that the book contains statements to the contrary. The situation just isn't analogous. Tracy Poff

On 10/21/07, Ron Ritzman <ritzman(a)gmail.com> wrote: [snip] Indeed but the there are two key points you might be missing: 1) They can take the content but only if they keep it under the GNU Free Documentation License, as you noted, which pretty much precludes the 'proprietary' mentioned in the ancestor post. 2) there is that they can take the *content*, not the *name*. The content is free the name is not. And why should or would the name be free? While trademarks are often regarded as assets of the trademark holder there is another completely valid way of looking at them: Trademarks are a form of consumer protection, a type of anti-fraud device. They exist to protect the public from being mislead by someone trying to pass off something else as Wikipedia that clearly isn't. I could see a good argument that the name should belong to 'the community' or 'the authors' rather than the WikiMedia foundation.... But presenting ownership of a trademark directly to a nearly indefinable, amorphous, self-selecting, and often internally conflicted, blob of people randomly scattered about the globe is probably impossible legally and probably undesirable. So, we have the WikiMedia Foundation a charitable non-profit with a substantially editor-elected board of trustees which fills that role of handling various things that the distributed users do not or can not do. The 'community' of authors and the WMF have a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship. The WMF's absolute authority over the daily operation of the site and all legal matters is balanced by the fact that all of the content comes from the community of editors, most of the funding comes from the public, and that the foundation isn't even a copyright holder over the content ... they use it at the mercy of free licenses just like anyone else. (Since the WMF does not have even the slightest privileged position over the content licensing, the community could manage a successful fork if something terrible happened).

On 22/10/2007, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote: Okay, so WMF is willing to release all their content under a do-as-I-tell-you-to-or-else license, much of which is based on the many proprietary journals and newspapers which exist in the journalism/academic work, and it still won't let people write about it? Why doesn't Wikipedia only use GFDL licensed original sources? That would be the first step to take, not trash people who write about the site and give it more publicity. Peter

On 21/10/2007, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote: Let me get this straight. You want the Wikimedia Foundation - a body which exists to promote the existence and spread of learning and the provision of information - to use trademark law to dictate the terms on which someone is to be permitted to write about it? I honestly cannot understand in what way this seems to be a good idea. There's a *reason* that even the most legally avaricious of corporations don't start rattling sabres when people write such books, and it's not because they didn't think of the idea. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On 10/22/07, Zoney <zoney.ie(a)gmail.com> wrote: That doesn't stop some from trying when a large company really really really wants a domain name held by a small one. A good example is Hasboro suing Clue Computing for the domain name clue.com.

Ron Ritzman wrote: Hard to tell from that argument: Which is clueful and which is clueless. :-) Ec

Zoney wrote: Apple Records and Apple Computers could get along fine until the latter decided to get into the music business. Ec