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