Arne Klempert wrote:

That sounds not very plausible because to my knowledge the US trademark is a pre-condition to apply for registration in the EU according to the Madrid Agreement.

Well, we could register the trademarks separately in some European country, but that doesn't make that much sense if we can get an EU-wide registration based on a prior US registration.

"Trademark registrations have been filed for (pending): Wikipedia, MediaWiki, Wikinews, Others?" <--- "Others?" doesn't make me feel confident that the rest of the list is correct. It would be great to get some more informations about the trademarks. At least registration numbers would be very helpfully to impress domain squatters.

So far, we've filed just the three applications for US trademark registration that I know of - Wikipedia, MediaWiki, and Wikinews, no others.

They don't have registration numbers because they're not registered yet, they're only in the application stage. The applications do have serial numbers, which you can get through the US Patent & Trademark Office's search function. You can also check the status, which in this case shows that none of the applications has yet been assigned to an examining attorney. (Applications seem to get entered in the system with decent regularity; I don't know how good they are about status updates.)

Since we're trying to identify all of these with the Wikimedia Foundation, so that Wikimedia is sort of the umbrella brand for all our projects, it would probably make sense to get Wikimedia registered as well. The name is getting some public exposure (the New York Times did a nice job differentiating in their piece about Wikinews), and it could be helpful with the wikimedia.com situation.

The domain name problem makes the issue of where to put the Foundation wiki academic for now, but ultimately I agree with Erik that we should definitely go with the shorter name. Either way, though, we should get ourselves the wikimedia.com domain.

Eventually we should register the other projects as trademarks too, but I'm not sure that should be an immediate financial priority. I think it's more important to get international registration going for the first four marks (the existing three and Wikimedia), once the US registration is in effect.

--Michael Snow