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

[Robert Scott Horning]

Delirium wrote:

> Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
>> Use of the term 'Media Wiki' as if it were their product or service. 
>> It is not.
>> That degrades our MediaWiki trademark and must be defended against if 
>> we wish
>> to keep control of that trademark.
>>
> This is what literally thousands of webhosts do when they advertise 
> "MySQL hosting" without having a disclaimer "MySQL is a trademark of 
> MySQL AB" or some sort of circumlocutory wording stating that they are 
> only offering "hosting of MySQL installations", and nobody seems to 
> mind that.
>
> -Mark

I'm not sure where you are looking, but any time you use a trademark 
that isn't yours, you need to put a disclaimer in the advertisement or 
documentation that the trademark belongs to somebody else.  It is also a 
case of pure ethics, regardless of law, that if you use something that 
belongs to somebody else, that you give proper credit to where you got 
it from.  This is a form a plagerism in this case, to claim that 
MediaWiki is software that you wrote or established.  The same goes with 
MySQL, where you ought to give credit to MySQL AB just as you've 
suggested above.  And yes, MySQL AB does complain when people claim that 
they are hosting MySQL installations without using the disclaimer that 
the trademark of "MySQL" is a trademark of MySQL AB.

And as has been pointed out, you need to defend trademarks whenever you 
can and when you notice that the trademark usage is abused.  Classic 
examples of Elevator and Asprin are good examples where they were once 
upon a time trademarks but became dilluted through misuse to become 
generic terms for the respective kinds of products.  I have a hard time 
however seeing MediaWiki becomming a generic term for any sort of Wiki 
server software, but the use of the term "Wiki" certainly would qualify 
as a generic term that can't be trademarked by itself, or to claim 
"royalties" for the use of the term Wiki in a project or product name. 
 That could be argued as a dilluted term and to describe a certain kind 
of web content editing software.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning