[Wikipedia-l] Wikimedia.de?

[Daniel Mayer]

Till Westermayer wtote:
>Wikimedia.de seems to be a project bound to 
>some progressive computer/ internet culture 
>and politics projects, i.e. there are connections 
>to the German Chaos Computer Club, to c-base, 
>to the Informationsfreiheiten.de wiki (a connection 
>of Berlin-based German Internet politics groups) 
>and so on. 

The scope of Wikimedia is pretty wide (and will get wider in the future). I'm 
not sure how similar they would have to be to Wikimedia to create confusion 
between us and them. I was more concerned with them suing us over trademark 
violations under the same stupid German law that KDE Illustrator 
(Killustrator) project was sued under (the Killustrator people were sued on 
behalf of Adobe Illustrator even though Adobe Illustrator never asked the 
litigators to do so!). 

>I'm pretty sure they will disambiguate on their 
>Wikimedia wiki, but I'm so sure they will give the
>domain to us. 

I just don't want our German Wikimedians to get sued and I'm sure other 
Wikimedians will want to visit Germany in the future too without fear of an 
injunction. I don't think there will that much confusion over this and don't 
think we should ask them to hand anything over. 

Now Wikipedia.ru is another matter; they are illegally using the Wikipedia 
trademark for a purpose that is nearly indistinguishable from ru.Wikipedia. 

If Wikipedia.ru were selling spark plugs then we wouldn't have much if any 
room to complain since that would not be a violation of our trademark (there 
would be little, if any, confusion between the two products - theirs and 
ours).

Of course, IANAL.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)