Ray Saintonge wrote:
Angela wrote:
On 11/9/05, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
I suggested EB as an abbreviation, not as a way to avoid trademark issues.
The potential trademark issue was brought up on this list last July: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2005-July/003645.html.
Since then, Wikisource has been mostly using the EB abbreviation, but there are still many mentions of the full name, so perhaps it was decided it wasn't an issue.
IIRC , someone had written to PG on this and they didn't seem to be worried about this.
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I wrote to Michael Hart and didn't get any reply at all. If I had, I would have posted it. I poked around Distrubited Proofreaders and generally speaking it appears as though the rest of the volumes for the Encyclopaedia Britannica are going to be using the original trademark to describe the contents of the e-book. In that regard PG doesn't seem too worried about the trademark issues. If the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. wants to go after the Wikimedia Foundation and myself as an editor who helped with the creation of the project on Wikisource, I say bring it on! Dropping a note on slashdot and a few other tech news sites is going to make Brittanica Inc. wish they had gone to Mars instead for the negative publicity it would generate. Besides, they havn't asked or demanded anything either, and this project has been going for several months now, and widespread links through other projects like Wikipedia and Wiktionary. We also have a formal disclaimer that acknowledges the source of the trademark, and even a hyperlink to the company website if anybody is really interested. That with a higher Google ranking alone ought to be worth something to Britannica, Inc.
Wikisource is using the EB abbriviation mainly because typing out Encyclopaedia Britannica as a namespace is a pain to use all of the time and consumes server space and bandwidth. It is easier to type EB1911 than 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. (The ae ligature is especially nasty to type in from an English language keyboard.) I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear somewhere on Wikisource earlier. It was certainly not done to avoid trademark usage although that was another motive of minor concern, not the primary issue. There are a bunch of templates, Wikisource project organization pages, categories, and more that were added that some very simple namespace had to be created to coordinate all of those pages and keep from making ambiguous references to elsewhere on Wikisource.