[Foundation-l] Trademarks (Was: A local chapter withoutWikimedians)

[Michael Snow]

Delirium wrote:
> Phil Nash wrote:
>   
>> Mike Godwin wrote:
>>     
>>>> On Nov 24, 2008, at 2:11 PM, Casey Brown wrote:
>>>>         
>>>>> Trademarks has been one of Mike's projects for a while now.
>>>>>           
>>>> That's right.  A very large percentage of my time is devoted to
>>>> securing the commercially valuable trademarks we hold and expanding
>>>> the jurisdictions in which those trademarks are recognized.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --Mike
>>>>         
>> I don't want to seem naive but it is unclear to me how this applies to an 
>> essentially non-profit organisation; if you can help me out with a link, I'd 
>> be grateful. Thanks.
>>     
> Well, some non-profit organizations are run essentially as businesses 
> (charitable mission notwithstanding), often explicitly in for-profit 
> holding companies that are subsidiaries of the main organization. For 
> example, this is how the Mozilla Corporation operates, and enforces a 
> very aggressive trademark policy aimed at monetarily exploiting the 
> trademarks it holds.
>
> On the other hand, Mozilla is a somewhat extreme case, and going down 
> that path had risks in terms of goodwill, also a valuable commodity for 
> donation- and volunteer-driven nonprofits.
>
> I would personally hope that our main interest in the trademarks is not 
> their commercial value, but their usefulness in furthering our stated 
> charitable mission, by reducing confusion on the part of potential users 
> and reusers of our content.
>   
The benefit of trademarks for us has two aspects. One is that trademarks 
identify the projects - ultimately, trademarks exist to identify - which 
serves to minimize confusion for the general public. That's the 
fundamental reason for having trademarks, protecting the names 
associated with our mission.

The second aspect is that our trademarks also have commercial value, as 
noted. What may not be immediately apparent is that this value isn't 
necessarily correlated with maximizing trademark income (the profit 
motive, or exploitation if you like). In fact, I'd submit that quite a 
bit of the value in our trademarks is due to our nonprofit status and 
mission. So when Mike talks about securing commercially valuable 
trademarks, this is as much about protecting them (from others trying to 
make money off them, either abusively without permission or 
detrimentally by taking advantage of us) as it is about making money 
from them ourselves.

It may help to realize that our emphasis is not on proactively seeking 
ways to license our trademarks to bring in revenue. In reality, we're 
not lacking in proposals, but more time is spent turning them down even 
though they might be lucrative, because they're not appropriate for what 
we do. If we can bring in funds to support the mission through trademark 
licensing, that helps, but it's the only reason to do so. Considerations 
of trademark value are secondary to their function as it relates to the 
mission.

--Michael Snow