[Wikimedia-l] It's time to reclaim the community logo

[Samuel Klein]

Tomasz Kozlowski writes:
> the WMF just hired the infamous Jones Day bullies

Talk about 'undue weight'...   Jones Day is just a large, competent
global legal firm, with 2500 lawyers. Neither saintly nor infamous.
Some of their lawyers supported Lessig in the Eldred case, others are
working right now with the EFF to help him fight bogus takedown
requests. Others intimidated a controversial website four years ago,
as you noted.[1]
They are a reasonable group to have working for the WMF; but also
large enough to have made the occasional mistake.

Craig Franklin writes:
> consider that the other side might just have a legitimate reason
> for what they're doing beyond causing trouble for the other.

It is clear that everyone who cares deeply about this has a legitimate
concern.

John Vandenberg writes:
> we're hoping to keep this low key in the hope a solution
> can be found by a well informed community during a
> good faith mediation process.

+1  I would hope we can resolve this within our community.

> [T]here are other options that we should explore. For example
> the Debian project only has a trademark on their logo combined
> with stylised 'Debian'. The logo without stylised 'Debian' is not
> trademarked.

That's not quite accurate.  They have trademarked the wordmark.
They have sporadically discussed trademarking the logo, but most
community discussion was around the copyright of the logo.  The logos
are now freely licensed.  The latest Debian community discussion
around trademark resulted in a plan to register the logo in the US
this year. [2]

I would love to see a detailed discussion about principle and desired
outcomes - TM is only a means to an end.  Let's figure out what we
want the end result to be; then we can use the best social tools
(norms, wiki policies, laws-if-needed) to make sure that happens.

Sam.

[1] http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_lessig_marapr04.msp
https://www.eff.org/cases/lawrence-lessig-v-liberation-music

[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2013/04/msg00082.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2013/06/msg00022.html