Thanks for the input, Mike. For those who, like me, were wondering what the
heck you were talking about, I believe the title of the thread this belongs
in is "Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos".
However, I have another question, which wasn't answered by that thread.
Your colleague said that "if you freely license the trademarked logo, that
may be interpreted by a court in trademark litigation as abandonment of the
trademark". And that certainly makes sense. Most free licenses don't even
mention copyright when they grant a license to do certain things. CC-BY-SA,
for instance, gives you "a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual
(for the duration of the applicable copyright) license...to Reproduce the
Work...[and]...to Distribute and Publicly Perform the Work". It may not be
a complete abandonment of the trademark, but you can't exactly successfully
sue someone for reproducing and distributing your logo without permission
after you've explicitly granted them permission to do so!
1) But what if the copyright on the logo is not held by the foundation in
the first place? Then the foundation isn't the one that granted the free
license.
And 2) I think most of the people who want the Wikimedia logos released
under a free license realize that this would mean the effective abandonment
of the trademark rights, and that actually that's the whole point.
Finally, I'd like to quote something that you said and make a comment: "My
experience has been that those who object to this haven't given adequate
attention to the GFDL and Creative Commons licenses we operate under --
neither license is "free,""
Umm, WTF? The GFDL and CC licenses aren't free? What's that whole thing
about Wikipedia being "the free encyclopedia", then? Did I misunderstand
the context in which you said that or did you misspeak or something?
On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 7:26 PM, Mike Godwin <mnemonic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Dear folks,
I was attending a meeting of the Northern California Copyright Society
today, and I mentioned to a colleague the discussions we have had on this
list and elsewhere regarding whether the Wikimedia logos, which are
trademarked, should be freely licensed as copyrighted works. My colleague
immediately said this: "Do they realize that if you freely license the
trademarked logo, that may be interpreted by a court in trademark
litigation
as abandonment of the trademark?"
Me: "Well, I've tried to suggest this, but perhaps I haven't said it
clearly enough. There's a tendency for some non-lawyers to assume that
trademark issues are wholly and necessarily separate from copyright
issues."
Colleague: "Well, you'd better tell them that freely licensing the logos
might undermine your ability to defend your trademarks in them."
And so, here I am, telling you just that.
Best regards,
--Mike