[Foundation-l] GFDL publisher credit (was: Wikibooks for sale)

Wed Jul 5 16:16:55 UTC 2006

daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

>To be perfectly clear, Anthony, I stated that our name (and logo) are  
>trademarked. That is unquestionable. The books were listed as being created the  
>Foundation, yet we had no knowledge of it. In other words, the publisher used  
>our trademarked name on a book without the agreement of  the Foundation. While I 
>am not assuming malicious intent, that is  clearly unacceptable. Don't twist 
>what I said.
>  
>
Trademark law can't be used to prevent statement of facts, though, so 
all uses of the name are not *necessarily* trademark violations, and as 
a matter of being nice we shouldn't be draconian about prohibiting 
people from ever mentioning our name.  For example, we ourselves have 
pages which say a particular article is based on text from the 1911 
Encyclopaedia Britannica.  That's of course not a violation of the 
trademarked name "Encyclopaedia Britannica".

The important issue is to avoid giving the impression that the Wikimedia 
Foundation is publishing or approved of the material.  If the use of the 
name "Wikimedia" or some other Wikimedia-Foundation-trademarked name is 
clearly done in a factual manner, then it shouldn't be a problem.

As far as legal details go, there doesn't appear to be any strong U.S. 
legal precedent in this area.  Again with the EB1911 example, nobody is 
really sure where the balance between the right to reprint public-domain 
material with factual attribution and Britannica's trademark rights 
lies.  So far people have erred on the side of caution by just renaming 
it, e.g. to "The Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia".  This is probably much 
more cautious than actually required, though.

-Mark