[Foundation-l] Wikipedia trade mark misuse

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro at gmail.com
Sun Jun 13 22:33:02 UTC 2010


Thomas Dalton wrote:
>
> "Dog" isn't strongly associated in the public psyche with a particular
> brand. "Wiki" is. Like I say, these are complicated issues of legal
> interpretation and really should be left to the lawyers.
>
>
>   
If there is any party with dibs on "Wiki", that would
be Ward Cunningham, not the WMF.

Also it is worth mentioning that the MediaWiki software
is not a trademark or anything remotely like that of WMF.

MediaWiki serves a huge community of which WMF is just
the literal butt-end. Sure, as a single site WMF is  t e h 
biggest. But it still in toto is dwarfed by the userbase in
whole.

In terms of dilution of trademark of WMF properties,
you would pretty much have to take a WMF projects
name and use it as a part or whole of what you were
offering. Just using "wiki" doesn't come close to meeting
that standard. Ward Cunningham I think famously
said that an encyclopaedia built over his software
might be something novel, but it wouldn't be a "wiki";
so we should really not be too tight-ass about things, if
Ward was laid-back to deliver a keynote at a Wikimania
anyway. Getting Ward to deliver a full brimstone and
hail Jeremiad against misappropriation of the term "wiki"
is the best that you could ask for in the particular instance
discussed here. I wouldn't hold my breath though.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen









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