[Juriwiki-l] Re: [Foundation-l] Trademark violation of our 'MediaWiki' mark

Tue Nov 1 00:12:21 UTC 2005

On 31/10/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
> > drive much of its development, possibly even with financial rewards.
>
> Not possibly. The foundation employs full time the lead developer of MediaWiki
> (and his primary duties are to do just that).

I meant "possibly" as in "I'm not sure", not as in "the fact itself is
uncertain", so thank you for clarifying.

[In response to my comments about "using in trade"]
> The foundation does not direct the creation of Wikipedia and is only one of
> many distributors of its content. What the foundation does do is act as the ISP
> for Wikipedia and her sister projects.

Hm, an interesting comparison; although, in relation to trademarks,
the Wikimedia Foundation is the *only* distributor of a product called
"Wikipedia" - that's exactly why they hold that trademark. While it is
one of many distributors of the *content*, it is the *only*
distributor of that actual product. In contrast, *any* copy of the
MediaWiki code is still MediaWiki - wikitravel.org is no less a user
of MediaWiki than wikipedia.org.

> > The name has only ever been attached to the software, on its own, as
> > developed by a group of independent coders on behalf of the WMF and
> > any other interested users (of which there are now many).
>
> That is also true of Wikipedia (except for a tiny amount of extant text by
> Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales that was transferred to the foundation when it was
> created).

But the name is not attached to the content *alone* - any reuse of
that content is explicitly *not* Wikipedia, so there is something
beyond the content which constitutes "Wikipedia" as an entity. That
additional something is what makes it tied to the Wikimedia
Foundation, in a way that the MediaWiki software is not.

Not that the above rules out the Foundation holding the "MediaWiki"
trademark, but it *is* a very different situation to that of the term
"Wikipedia".

> > [In fact, I think it was named as a direct result of generalising the software for
> > use *outside* Wikipedia]
>
> No. I suggested the name as a play on the foundation's name; Wikimedia ->
> MediaWiki.

This isn't exactly on-topic, but all I meant was that it only needed a
name once it was decided that it could and should have an existence
(and users) outside Wikipedia. I may be wrong about that - I wasn't
around at the time, but I've come across old discussions which
suggested that to me - but it's certainly not mutually exclusive to
you having named it.

> I then bought the .org and .com domains, donated them
> to the foundation and officially transferred all my rights to the name to the
> foundation.

Ah, now that I didn't know; I've no idea of the legal intricacies, but
it does seem reasonable that, as the originator of the name, the
trademark rights were yours to give away, in which case all other
reasonings are irrelevant. Since the MediaWiki development team [I
would presume] doesn't consitute a legal entity, I guess they couldn't
claim you transferred it to them first, even if "they" wanted to.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]