trademarked logos and GPL

[Bart Decrem]

Hi Larry,

Of course we're going to run this by our attorneys but I was trying to see if
there's a 'standard' practice for this that the open source community follows
(btw, I too have a law degree).

Bart



"Lawrence E. Rosen" wrote:

> I want to discourage license-discuss participants from answering questions
> like this one.  Not that its a bad question, or one that would be
> uninteresting for more than the questioner to hear answered.  But
> non-lawyers have to avoid giving legal advice -- and the questioner would be
> foolish to accept legal advice from non-lawyers about a technically
> complicated subject such as trademark law.
>
> Even lawyers like me have to be very careful.  We are not supposed to give
> generic legal advice to non-clients over the Internet.  That's why I
> sometimes avoid answering questions on this discussion list, simply because
> I don't want to be seen as advising someone how to act when I don't know
> them and don't represent them.
>
> I encourage the questioner to direct his question, in private, to an
> attorney.  If you don't know of a good attorney, call me or call other
> people you know and ask for recommendations.
>
> /Larry Rosen
> Attorney and Executive Director, OSI
> 650-216-1597
> lrosen at rosenlaw.com
> www.opensource.org
> www.rosenlaw.com
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Bart Decrem [mailto:bart at eazel.com]
> > Sent: Monday, January 22, 2001 5:17 PM
> > To: license-discuss at opensource.org
> > Cc: dan at eazel.com
> > Subject: trademarked logos and GPL
> >
> >
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > I have a feeling that the question I'm about to ask has been
> > asked & answered a few
> > times already, so I do apologize for that.
> >
> > We at Eazel are trying to figure out what we need to do so we can
> > distribute our
> > corporate logo along with our Nautilus software, which is GPL'd,
> > without losing our
> > ability to control the use of our trademark.
> >
> > It looks like Red Hat distributes their logo in a separate RPM,
> > which is released under
> > very restrictive licensing terms, and that there are a few GPL'd
> > applications (most
> > prominently Red Hat Update Agent) that have a dependency on that.
> >
> > So we're thinking of doing exactly the same thing.  We use the
> > Eazel logo as a
> > 'throbber' (think: the throbbing N in your Netscape browser).
> > The installer for our
> > Nautilus software would always install that logo.  But if someone
> > objects to the
> > licensing terms of the logo, they could uninstall our logo RPM,
> > in which case they
> > would see a generic throbber.  The CVS version of our source code
> > would only include
> > the generic throbber.
> >
> > Is this the best way to proceed?
> >
> > Bart
> >
> >