Angela wrote:
There are problems with posting to this list from
gmane, so I'm sending this on behalf of Anthere and
Jamesday.
Is it a general problem, or specific to this list? I at least didn't
have any trouble reading it there. It's hard enough getting people to
use the right mailing list around here without there being technical
obstacles.
Anthere supports what Michael is saying about the need
to register trademarks, and would like to know if
anyone has made any estimates of the cost of doing
this in each country. Basically, has any overall
amount been calculated?
The last time this came up, somebody indicated that the fee in Germany
was 300 euros. I haven't confirmed this, but it was also stated that
registration would be valid for the entire EU. If so, presumably the fee
would be the same whether we registered in Germany, France, or someplace
else? I would still register in the US first, because the foundation is
based in the US.
The 335 US dollars is a filing fee to apply for registration of a single
trademark, and I'm guessing 300 euros is the same thing. The more
trademarks we want to register, the more it might cost us. Of all our
possible trademarks, I think Wikipedia is the most critical, so we
should probably start there and then consider the others.
Additionally, Toby mentions (based on our own content) that attorney
fees for filing the application could be $800 to $1500. But I think
Jimbo might decide to see if somebody will do it pro bono, since
Wikimedia is a nonprofit.
Jamesday has suggested that registering the trademarks
are probably not really needed for protection as the
name is quite well known now. For domain names, the
uniform domain name dispute policy requires that the
name be registered and used in good faith. Stealing a
Wikipedia name is bad faith and makes any site likely
to lose.
I'm not sure that I agree with Jamesday as to how well known we are yet.
In certain circles, yes, but we're only starting to really get
mainstream media coverage, and Wikipedia is hardly a household name
offline. I may be misunderstanding his point here, since it's filtered
through Angela, but the purpose of trademark registration would be more
than just to keep somebody from using, say, wikipedia.fr as a domain name.
--Michael Snow