[Foundation-l] Wikipedia trade mark misuse

Jiří Hofman hofmanj at aldebaran.cz
Sat Jun 12 18:47:33 UTC 2010


Hi!

One of the Czech online news services, Aktuálně.cz ( http://aktualne.cz ) has launched its own encyclopedia a few weeks ago. Links to the encyclopedia's articles are used in news articles on this server. That would not be anything strange if the encyclopedia wasn't named "Wiki". Even that would not be so strange. But it is not a wiki at all. Users and/or readers of this server cannot edit it. It looks like the name was not chosen after a generic word "wiki" but  "Wikipedia". I consider this as a misuse of the Wikipedia trade mark.

The issue has been brought to the Czech Wikipedia community (by accident twice):
http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedie:Pod_l%C3%ADpou_%28v_rohu%29#Wiki_aktu.C3.A1ln.C4.9B
http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedie:Pod_l%C3%ADpou_%28pr%C3%A1va%29#Zneu.C5.BEit.C3.AD_dobr.C3.A9ho_jm.C3.A9na_Wikipedie

The community is not unanimous. Therefore I would like to ask an international Wikipedia community for its opinion. Is it a violation of the Wikimedia Foundation rights?

Something more to know:

1)  The "Wiki" is here: http://wiki.aktualne.centrum.cz/ . The article "Poslanecká sněmovna Parlamentu ČR" ("Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic") is currently used as its title page.

2) According to the Czech Wikipedia user Elm, the Aktualne.cz wants to make editing by users possible in the future.

3) No license violation has been noticed in this encyclopedia so far.

Additional questions:
Are any Wikimedia Foundation's trademarks registered also for / in Czechia or the European Union? How the Wikimedia Foundation would defend its trademarks in Czechia or the EU? Did the Wikimedia Foundation solved a similar case ever before?

Thanks for your opinions. I hope a clear statement will be given by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Jiri
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