[Foundation-l] Fair Use and Registered Trademarks

[Ray Saintonge]

Robert Scott Horning wrote:

> Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
>
>> Le 8 juil. 05 à 01:19, Ray Saintonge a écrit :
>>
>>> I'm inclined to generally agree.  There is a likelihood of  
>>> confusion between the trademark and the publication, but there are  
>>> also easily available techniques for dealing with that.  Writing a  
>>> suitable disclaimer and linking to it from every extracted article  
>>> should be more than enough to satisfy their objections about  
>>> trademark infringement.
>>
>> Such a disclaimer should precise that this text is public domain but  
>> that the title is also a registered trademark that cannot be used  
>> outside of the public domain use of the work.
>
> Should such a disclaimer be a part of the general disclaimer of 
> Wikisource, or is this something that has to be done for each and 
> every separate work (like this 1911 EB collection)?  While I've seen 
> plenty of these kind of disclaimers, this seems as though it is a 
> legal document, or at least something that should be drafted by 
> somebody familiar in a professional sense with trademark and copyright 
> law, and not some random Wikimedia user.  This disclaimer could be put 
> in through a template, but that seems a little excessive to have to 
> include it on every article. 

A link to the disclaimer should be enough.  What makes this different 
from other situations is that very few relevant trademarks from 1911 
continue to be valid 94 years later.  The drafting should not be a big 
problem; the elements of what it needs to cover are already there in the 
notice from Project Gutenberg.  My preference has always been to 
identify these articles as "Title (EB11)" since these ti a strong 
likelihood that another article on this same topic could be captured 
from another source.  A possible link might read, "For information about 
the source of this article see [[ . . .|EB11]]".   I think that this is 
someplace where we can take a co-operative attitude.  We're interested 
in the content and its proper attribution; we have no use for their 
trademarks or any attack on that.

Ec