[Foundation-l] Trademark violation of our 'MediaWiki' mark

[Robert Scott Horning]

Kelly Martin wrote:

>On 10/28/05, Arne Klempert <klempert at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>The text is a little bit confusing ("the new product" might sound like
>>it's their product), but I see no reason for your "trying to induce"
>>thing. And I really don't see any trademark violation here. Of course
>>we have to defend our trademarks but we also should avoid trademark
>>paranoia.
>>    
>>
>
>Don't take this advice; it's absolutely bad.
>
>You absolutely must defend the mark by requiring them to insert
>"MediaWiki is a trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation" or other such
>content in that advert.  Failure to do so will dilute the mark.  This
>is a trademark violation in the sense that they used a trademark not
>belonging to them to advertise a commercial service without
>acknowledging that it's not their mark.
>
>There's no such thing as "trademark paranoia".  Failure to defend the
>mark against dilution will quite simply cause the loss of the mark.
>
>Kelly
>  
>
While I would agree that the Wikimedia Foundation needs to enforce the 
trademark here, this isn't that big of a deal.  Other than not 
mentioning as a disclaimer that MediaWiki is a trademark of the 
foundation can this even be considered a problem and that can be cleaned 
up with just adding an asterix to the name and a short statement at the 
bottom of the web page.  

All they are doing is offering MediaWiki hosting for their clients just 
as many ISP and web hosting services will also support MySQL hosting on 
their servers.  In many ways, this shows the popularity and the progress 
of this piece of software and the foundation should take this as a 
compliment.  It also shows that there is commercial demand for people 
who want to use the MediaWiki software to host Wiki services and not be 
trying to sneak onto Wikipedia or other Wikimedia project for free 
hosting.  That would be a good thing all around, and indeed something we 
should be encouraging or even getting into a partnership with somebody 
over.  Some sort of partnership where experienced admins and developers 
from the various projects offering technical assistance in setting up 
MediaWiki servers for a minor donation to the Wikimedia Foundation 
sounds like something that would benefit just about everybody here.  Or 
heck, even get paid for the technical assistance where experience as an 
editor on Wikipedia would be worth something other than just a line of 
volunteer work on your resume.

Don't get mad at people like this... encourage them but try to help them 
with mistakes like failure to put a disclaimer on their use of term 
MediaWiki.  This could be a real opportunity instead.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning