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

[Casey Brown]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 11:04 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?
>

Trademarks has been one of Mike's projects for a while now.

-- 
Casey Brown
Cbrown1023

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