[Commons-l] Re: Trademarks

Thu Sep 15 10:35:50 UTC 2005

Claus Färber wrote:
> Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> schrieb/wrote:
> 
>>The core goal of Commons is maximal reuse.
> 
> 
> Maximal reuse might result in minial content.
> 
> I think every restriction should be evaluated to determine whether the
> image is still "free enough".
> 
> With copyright, that's quite easy: Copyright restricts nearly every act
> of redistribution, so it makes sense to require that images and other
> media need to have a "free license".[1]
> 
> On the other hand, trademarks only restricts labelling products with the
> image or impersonating the owner, i.e. "trademarkish" use. IMO(!),
> that's still "free enough".
> 
> Further, there's a conflict if you include "trademarkish" use within the
> maximal reuse goal of Wikimedia: If someone really starts to use an
> image on Commons as a trademark, it's likely to become protected as a
> trademark (and incompatible with the maximal reuse goal).
> 
> Finally, there are some practical problems with a strict no-trademark
> policy. As everything can be trademarked, you would have to do regular
> trademark searches with every trademark registry. You can't ask the
> author/source of an image (especially if it's PD or depicts something
> found in nature) and there are very few things that can't be trademarked
> (and virtually none the upload of which to Commons makes sense).
> 
> 

Agreed. This makes perfect sense to me.

-- 
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \