Till Westermayer wtote:
Wikimedia.de seems to be a project bound to
some progressive computer/ internet culture
and politics projects, i.e. there are connections
to the German Chaos Computer Club, to c-base,
to the Informationsfreiheiten.de wiki (a connection
of Berlin-based German Internet politics groups)
and so on.
The scope of Wikimedia is pretty wide (and will get wider in the future). I'm
not sure how similar they would have to be to Wikimedia to create confusion
between us and them. I was more concerned with them suing us over trademark
violations under the same stupid German law that KDE Illustrator
(Killustrator) project was sued under (the Killustrator people were sued on
behalf of Adobe Illustrator even though Adobe Illustrator never asked the
litigators to do so!).
I'm pretty sure they will disambiguate on their
Wikimedia wiki, but I'm so sure they will give the
domain to us.
I just don't want our German Wikimedians to get sued and I'm sure other
Wikimedians will want to visit Germany in the future too without fear of an
injunction. I don't think there will that much confusion over this and don't
think we should ask them to hand anything over.
Now Wikipedia.ru is another matter; they are illegally using the Wikipedia
trademark for a purpose that is nearly indistinguishable from ru.Wikipedia.
If Wikipedia.ru were selling spark plugs then we wouldn't have much if any
room to complain since that would not be a violation of our trademark (there
would be little, if any, confusion between the two products - theirs and
ours).
Of course, IANAL.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)