Trademark policies and licenses
Russ Nelson
nelson at crynwr.com
Sun Aug 8 01:58:51 UTC 2010
Tony Yarusso writes:
> Hi, I'm trying to figure out what the usual / proper way of referencing
> a trademark policy is. In short, we have a trademark policy similar to
> Ubuntu or Mozilla saying that people can use the term "Nagios" for
> add-ons built for our software and community advocacy, and a license
> that allows people to build derivatives of part of it (we have both an
> OSS and commercial version now), but don't want the term "Nagios" used
> for forks resulting from that license.
Maybe we need to have an Open Source Trademark Definition? :-)
> The question then is, how do we tell people about that trademark
> policy? Should it be placed in the license itself (and would that
> nullify the OSI approval and/or compatibilities of the license),
> just placed online and hope that somehow people magically decide to
> Google for it, or something else?
Oh, there's no problem putting your trademark policy into a separate
license, and there's no problem mentioning it in the preamble to your
license, or your README, or wherever it is that you tell people that
they can have a copyright license if they comply with the contents of
the file called "LICENSE".
> Legally speaking the combination of an OSI-approved license and our
> trademark policy appear to accomplish what we want, but we seem to
> be having difficulty getting people to actually *read* / care about
> our trademark policy currently. What would you recommend?
Well, you kinda don't have to make sure that they read it. Without
entering into a contract with you, they have no license to use your
trademark other than the usual ways in which you can use a trademark
without permission.
--
--my blog is at http://blog.russnelson.com
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