[Foundation-l] Re: Registering Wikimedia trademarks

Thu Apr 29 04:37:21 UTC 2004

Angela wrote:

>There are problems with posting to this list from
>gmane, so I'm sending this on behalf of Anthere and
>Jamesday.
>
Is it a general problem, or specific to this list? I at least didn't 
have any trouble reading it there. It's hard enough getting people to 
use the right mailing list around here without there being technical 
obstacles.

>Anthere supports what Michael is saying about the need
>to register trademarks, and would like to know if
>anyone has made any estimates of the cost of doing
>this in each country. Basically, has any overall
>amount been calculated? 
>
The last time this came up, somebody indicated that the fee in Germany 
was 300 euros. I haven't confirmed this, but it was also stated that 
registration would be valid for the entire EU. If so, presumably the fee 
would be the same whether we registered in Germany, France, or someplace 
else? I would still register in the US first, because the foundation is 
based in the US.

The 335 US dollars is a filing fee to apply for registration of a single 
trademark, and I'm guessing 300 euros is the same thing. The more 
trademarks we want to register, the more it might cost us. Of all our 
possible trademarks, I think Wikipedia is the most critical, so we 
should probably start there and then consider the others.

Additionally, Toby mentions (based on our own content) that attorney 
fees for filing the application could be $800 to $1500. But I think 
Jimbo might decide to see if somebody will do it pro bono, since 
Wikimedia is a nonprofit.

>Jamesday has suggested that registering the trademarks
>are probably not really needed for protection as the
>name is quite well known now. For domain names, the
>uniform domain name dispute policy requires that the
>name be registered and used in good faith. Stealing a
>Wikipedia name is bad faith and makes any site likely
>to lose.
>
I'm not sure that I agree with Jamesday as to how well known we are yet. 
In certain circles, yes, but we're only starting to really get 
mainstream media coverage, and Wikipedia is hardly a household name 
offline. I may be misunderstanding his point here, since it's filtered 
through Angela, but the purpose of trademark registration would be more 
than just to keep somebody from using, say, wikipedia.fr as a domain name.

--Michael Snow