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

Tue Nov 1 11:50:10 UTC 2005

On 10/31/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> 1) I am not the sole author of MediaWiki, I'm just one of several people
> who's worked on it.
>
> 2) My work on MediaWiki antedates my employment with Wikimedia, so
> Wikimedia can make no claim on my prior contributions.

Of course.

3) The verbal agreement Jimmy and I made was that I would continue to
> retain copyright to software contributions I make during my employment.

Copyright assignment must be in writing. If you really care about this,
well, you can figure out what to do. Of course it almost surely doesn't
matter.

4) As far as I know, the Foundation has no copyright interest in
> MediaWiki. Some contributors have renounced their copyright interest, so
> fragments here and there may be public domain. ;)

Now that's interesting. The parts owned by the foundation *could* be
permanently released into the public domain. At that point, if it were
considered a joint work (you seem to suggest it would saying that you're not
the only author), anyone could use *only the parts created by you as an
employee* without a license, and the rest under the GPL. But I'm fairly sure
that simply not having a copyright interest isn't enough to release
something into the public domain, and that you have to explicitly do so.

Again this is mostly just interesting to think about and doesn't really
matter for practical purposes. Copyright law is extremely screwed up,
especially in the United States with fair use, public domain, cancellations
of transfers, etc.

5) The Foundation may own the trademark on the name MediaWiki, which
> postdates the creation of the software itself.

Yeah, I have no idea. They probably do, but that's just based on my
extremely limited knowledge of trademark law. The case for MediaWiki being a
famous mark subject to trademark dilution law is probably a bit less likely
though.

6) A trademark registration for the mark was filed last year on behalf
> of the foundation, though it hasn't totally gone through yet. (I'm not
> the person to ask for details on that.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com <http://pobox.com>)

Well, if that gets granted it'll provide a lot of evidence toward the
position that the WMF holds the trademark.

Anthony