Re: [Foundation-l] Offering Wikibooks content for sale

geni wrote: I'm just pointing out that if for some reason a book called "Wikijunior Big Cats" is widely known as a valuable book and appears in many different classrooms and the hands of many parents and children, it is something by itself that is a brand that is highly recognized. Some companies, notably Paramount Studios with their Star Trek franchise, have gone to incredible lengths to trademark all kinds of related words as trademarks and even have gone through the effort to register them with the USPTO. Notably Captain Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Scotty, and other names are formally trademarked and can't be used theoretically without formal permission from Paramount, keeping you from even potentially writing fan fiction using those characters or even writing commentary about Star Trek episodes. This very posting to the mailing list, under extreme interpretation of the law, could be considered an infringing use of trademarks for that company. In this same token, it might be possible for the WMF to control publication rights to Wikimedia project content merely on the basis of trademark infringement, as has appeared to have occured here with the Wikijunior Big Cats book. Clearly this is the name of the Wikibook and it is being worked on by Wikibooks users, with numerous links to the project page under that name from many other sources both within and outside of Wikimedia projects. -- Robert Scott Horning