[Foundation-l] Trademarks (Was: A local chapter without Wikimedians)

[Thomas Dalton]

2008/11/24 Michael Bimmler <mbimmler at gmail.com>:
> Yeah and, what Nathan probably meant: If a chapter ignores a
> termination message and keeps using the trademark, we would need to
> obtain an injunction in *their* country. Now, I think the Wikipedia
> trademark is not even registered internationally yet (it isn't in
> Switzerland, so I suppose it isn't in that many other countries
> either), so we'd run into problems. As a matter of fact, the chapter
> could just register the trademark in the country and unless the
> foundation was willing to really put up a court fight to get the
> trademark back, they could just ignore the termination notice.

That's an interesting question. What is the current trademark
situation for the WMF? A trademarks committee was set up nearly 3
years ago to advise the board on what trademarks to register and where
but it seems to have only lasted a few months before disbanding. There
is a page on meta ("Wikimedia Trademarks") that was marked as
historical over a year ago on which Angela said the details of the
trademarks were confidential, but that doesn't sound right - how can a
registered trademark be confidential? Doesn't it need to be public
knowledge in order to serve a purpose? The main reasons I can see in
old discussions for not registering everything and everywhere was that
it's expensive and time consuming, but we have a much larger budget
now (the discussions say the registration fee is $400 a time for the
US, which was a lot of money for the foundation 2 or 3 years ago, it
isn't now) and a full time staff (including a general counsel) which
it didn't have when the committee was set up. It would seem we can
reasonably register (and even, if necessary, defend) all our major
trademarks in at least those countries where we have significant
activity (in terms of readership, more than anything), so has this
been done?