[Foundation-l] Re: Hosting scans of the 1911 Britannica on Wikimedia

[Robert Scott Horning]

Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Angela wrote:
>
>> On 11/9/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>>  
>>
>>> I suggested EB as an abbreviation, not as a way to avoid
>>> trademark issues.
>>>   
>>
>> The potential trademark issue was brought up on this list last July:
>> <http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2005-July/003645.html>. 
>>
>> Since then, Wikisource has been mostly using the EB abbreviation, but
>> there are still  many mentions of the full name, so perhaps it was
>> decided it wasn't an issue.
>>
> IIRC , someone had written to PG on this and they didn't seem to be 
> worried about this.
>
> Ec
>
I wrote to Michael Hart and didn't get any reply at all.  If I had, I 
would have posted it.  I poked around Distrubited Proofreaders and 
generally speaking it appears as though the rest of the volumes for the 
Encyclopaedia Britannica are going to be using the original trademark to 
describe the contents of the e-book.  In that regard PG doesn't seem too 
worried about the trademark issues.  If the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 
Inc. wants to go after the Wikimedia Foundation and myself as an editor 
who helped with the creation of the project on Wikisource, I say bring 
it on!  Dropping a note on slashdot and a few other tech news sites is 
going to make Brittanica Inc. wish they had gone to Mars instead for the 
negative publicity it would generate.  Besides, they havn't asked or 
demanded anything either, and this project has been going for several 
months now, and widespread links through other projects like Wikipedia 
and Wiktionary.  We also have a formal disclaimer that acknowledges the 
source of the trademark, and even a hyperlink to the company website if 
anybody is really interested.  That  with a higher Google ranking alone 
ought to be worth something to Britannica, Inc.

Wikisource is using the EB abbriviation mainly because typing out 
Encyclopaedia Britannica as a namespace is a pain to use all of the time 
and consumes server space and bandwidth.  It is easier to type EB1911 
than 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. (The ae ligature is especially nasty 
to type in from an English language keyboard.)  I'm sorry if I didn't 
make that clear somewhere on Wikisource earlier.  It was certainly not 
done to avoid trademark usage although that was another motive of minor 
concern, not the primary issue.  There are a bunch of templates, 
Wikisource project organization pages, categories, and more that were 
added that some very simple namespace had to be created to coordinate 
all of those pages and keep from making ambiguous references to 
elsewhere on Wikisource.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning