[Foundation-l] Re: Progress on wikimedia.com?

Thu Feb 10 05:34:18 UTC 2005

Arne Klempert wrote:

>That sounds not very plausible because to my knowledge the US trademark
>is a pre-condition to apply for registration in the EU according to the
>Madrid Agreement.
>  
>
Well, we could register the trademarks separately in some European 
country, but that doesn't make that much sense if we can get an EU-wide 
registration based on a prior US registration.

>"Trademark registrations have been filed for (pending): Wikipedia,
>MediaWiki, Wikinews, Others?" <--- "Others?" doesn't make me feel
>confident that the rest of the list is correct. It would be great to get
>some more informations about the trademarks. At least registration
>numbers would be very helpfully to impress domain squatters.
>  
>
So far, we've filed just the three applications for US trademark 
registration that I know of - Wikipedia, MediaWiki, and Wikinews, no others.

They don't have registration numbers because they're not registered yet, 
they're only in the application stage. The applications do have serial 
numbers, which you can get through the US Patent & Trademark Office's 
search function. You can also check the status, which in this case shows 
that none of the applications has yet been assigned to an examining 
attorney. (Applications seem to get entered in the system with decent 
regularity; I don't know how good they are about status updates.)

Since we're trying to identify all of these with the Wikimedia 
Foundation, so that Wikimedia is sort of the umbrella brand for all our 
projects, it would probably make sense to get Wikimedia registered as 
well. The name is getting some public exposure (the New York Times did a 
nice job differentiating in their piece about Wikinews), and it could be 
helpful with the wikimedia.com situation.

The domain name problem makes the issue of where to put the Foundation 
wiki academic for now, but ultimately I agree with Erik that we should 
definitely go with the shorter name. Either way, though, we should get 
ourselves the wikimedia.com domain.

Eventually we should register the other projects as trademarks too, but 
I'm not sure that should be an immediate financial priority. I think 
it's more important to get international registration going for the 
first four marks (the existing three and Wikimedia), once the US 
registration is in effect.

--Michael Snow