Daniel-
Erik wrote:
> Of course I should be allowed to start Erik's Garden
> Olympics or to call my open source game "Mega Olympics".
Strawman. That's different Erik; you clearly are
disambiguating the name
from /the/ Olympics.
Where's the guy who keeps correcting people when they use the term "straw
man"? ;-) So let's call my Garden Olympics "the Olympics". It
doesn't
matter for the sake of this example.
Even your use examples might still be suspect,
however.
I agree that they would be legally suspect. I was talking about the
morality of trademark law. If I advertise my Olympics to make money with
them, then I agree that it is moral to stop me from doing that. But if
there is no profit motive, trademark law should not be applicable.
I'm using this example to clarify what moral positions I think Wikimedia
should and should not take. We should never legally act against someone
who is using the name "Wikipedia" without a profit motive. I believe that
this is a misuse of trademark law, and allows things like the use of
trademarks to threaten open source projects, or anti-corporate websites
like
StopEsso.com, to happen. Lest we become hypocrites, we should be very
careful about which instruments of the law we do and do not use.
> I am strongly morally opposed to using the UDRP
process
> to hijack domain names registered by others.
And what about the initial hijacking of our trademark
to begin with?
They did not hijack any registered trademark, and unregistered trademarks
seem to be a US-specific thing.
Sigh. It has already been stated /several/ times to
you that we /do/ have a
very clear trademark on the Wikipedia name. Registration is a secondary
issue (as with copyrights).
Unless you show evidence that this is the case outside the US I will
assume that it is not. And that makes the argument very weak, legally
speaking.
> I'm not saying we should do nothing. I am
saying we
I agree with this completely. However if they want an
unreasonable price
(IMO over 3 times what they paid to register the domain) then IMO we advance
to the next level.
Which is ignoring them.
We should also eventually register all Wikimedia
trademarks starting with
Wikimedia and Wikipedia.
I am sympathetic to registering trademarks and using them to stop simple
cybersquatting (that is, a no-content domain). Anything beyond that should
be discussed. In any case, all actions need to be approved by Jimbo.
Regards,
Erik