[Foundation-l] Wiktionary logo competition makes b3ta

[Robert Rohde]

On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 11:25 AM, Jussi-Ville
Heiskanen<cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
>> 2009/8/14 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com>:
>>
>>
>>> Sigh. Of course you know, Bob, the MediaWiki flower isn't
>>> a trademark or anything remotely of the sort "owned" or
>>> even claimed in other than authorship fashion by anyone.
>>>
>>
>>
>> You're probably wrong there, actually -
>
> I am virtually sure I am not wrong in fact.
>
>> even if the MediaWiki flower
>> isn't a registered trademark, it could probably be quite well defended
>> by use as a trademark.
> Perhaps, if it weren't for the inconvenient - for your theory -
> fact that the author (Florence Devouard) explicitly freed the
> image into the public domain, so as to be utilizable everywhere
> where mediawiki is used, regardless of licensing scheme.
>
>> Slippery thing, law.
>>
> It may be slippery, but trying to claim trademark protection
> for a PD image, is even beyond the unctuousness of the
> legal profession.

There are many trademarks that are in the public domain due either to
old age or due to their design being too simple to be eligible for
copyright protection in the first place (e.g. text logos).  The
Coca-Cola logo is a famous example of public domain image (by age)
that is also still a current trademark.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Trademarks

There is no reason that public domain images can't also be a
trademarks, though it may be harder to establish it as such.

In the specific case of "Bob the flower", the bigger problem is that
no one has been actively defending its use as a trademark.  The more
examples of use there are unaffiliated with Mediawiki, the more
difficult it would be to assert that it is a trademark representing
Mediawiki.  It is also unclear who would be in the position to
authorize the use of such a trademark, i.e. who would own the rights
to the mark.

-Robert Rohde.

PS. Since when did the flower have the name "Bob"?