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

Mon Oct 31 14:30:11 UTC 2005

On 10/30/05, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
>
> Delirium wrote:
>
> > Daniel Mayer wrote:
> >
> >> Use of the term 'Media Wiki' as if it were their product or service.
> >> It is not.
> >> That degrades our MediaWiki trademark and must be defended against if
> >> we wish
> >> to keep control of that trademark.
> >>
> > This is what literally thousands of webhosts do when they advertise
> > "MySQL hosting" without having a disclaimer "MySQL is a trademark of
> > MySQL AB" or some sort of circumlocutory wording stating that they are
> > only offering "hosting of MySQL installations", and nobody seems to
> > mind that.
> >
> > -Mark
>
> I'm not sure where you are looking, but any time you use a trademark
> that isn't yours, you need to put a disclaimer in the advertisement or
> documentation that the trademark belongs to somebody else. It is also a
> case of pure ethics, regardless of law, that if you use something that
> belongs to somebody else, that you give proper credit to where you got
> it from.

If in fact corporations can own words, that's a matter of law, not ethics.
Of course, corporations can't own words, so this is a bad argument anyway.

This is a form a plagerism in this case, to claim that
> MediaWiki is software that you wrote or established.

They're not making that claim though (and plagiarism is much different from
trademark infringement).

I looked at the ad, and it's confusing, especially due to the fact that they
use the term "the Media Wiki" for the name of the software. Whether this
amounts to trademark infringement, I don't know, and frankly it doesn't
matter unless Wikipedia intends to engage in a long drawn out lawsuit over
such a silly thing. It doesn't look like there's anything intentional going
on, just an ad written by someone with poor writing skills.