[Juriwiki-l] Re: [Foundation-l] Trademark violation of our 'MediaWiki' mark
Robert Scott Horning
robert_horning at netzero.net
Mon Oct 31 00:45:06 UTC 2005
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
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