[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia: The Missing Manual (O'Reilly, Dec 2007)

[Kwan Ting Chan]

> If the WMF isn't in such a legal position, then I go back to my
> comment earlier: "Wow, I'm rather surprised by that.  Ohwell."  Too
> bad.

(IANAL)

I shall refer you to our own article [[Trademark]] which provides a link
to "Fair Use of Trademarks" (http://www.publaw.com/fairusetrade.html) .

The work is not contributing to the dilution of the trademark, it is not
disparaging, it does not turn the trademark into a noun or verb or
plural form, the trademark stand out as such. It otherwise fulfill
requirement for "nominative use" of another's trademark, including the
work "does nothing that would, in conjunction with the trademark,
suggest to the reader sponsorship or endorsement by the trademark
owner". I'm also pretty sure that there would be disclaimer about who
own the Wikipedia trademark inside the book, not endorsement etc.

> > It strikes me that we have made our project by writing an
> > encyclopedia; we write about anything and everything - people,
> > organisations, products - without ever asking permission to do so or
> > to use their name, and indeed we aggressively make a lot of noise
> > about our right to do this.
> 
> I think the title of an encyclopedia article is significantly
> different from the title of a book.  "Wikipedia: The Missing Manual"
> strikes me as something created by Wikipedia.  When I saw the title to
> this thread, that's what I thought it was going to be.  Even "The
> Missing Manual: Wikipedia" would be less confusing in my opinion.  So
> I figured from this that trademark law would apply.

Only because you're familiar with the web page title of a Wikipedia's
article. If you look at the article book, no reasonable person would be
confuse by it being an article rather than a book that describe
Wikipedia (or eBay or ...).

We're also not talking just the title of a Wikipedia's article. We use
the name in the title, we use it multiple time within the article, we
(at least a sizeable portion) fight for the fair use of their logo and
what not in the article in describing them. It's not any different here.
In our article, we talk about a company, a company product etc. Here,
the book talk about how someone would go about editing Wikipedia.

Just because you might not agree with someone writing a book that's not
free content doesn't mean we can have different interpretation of fair
use applying to our use of someone else's IP and someone else use of our
project IP.

> > Firefox became too concerned
> > with their name and it's usage, and people stopped using it (Debian) -
> > who does that help?
> >
> This has nothing to do with Firefox.

We're talking about another use of one's trademark, it's not as far
apart in concept as you might otherwise suggest.

KTC

-- 
Experience is a good school but the fees are high.
  - Heinrich Heine
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