trademark and branding

Wednesday, Jan 23. 2008  –  Category: OpenSource, Songbird

sigh. it’s the issue that i never get to escape. it came up in OpenSolaris, and its starting to rear its head with Songbird. :-)

basically i’m trying to figure out how third parties (e.g. distributions such as Ubuntu or Debian) can have a package called “songbird” with our branding, logo, and artwork while protecting our trademarks from dilution, and potential infringement or malicious use.

i’m having some good discussion with various people from said distributions as well as POTI’s lawyers and hope to have something figured out soon… it’s definitely a thorny issue, as evidenced by Mozilla & Debian’s spat with Firefox^WIceweasel

thorny issues from all sides…. and really, at heart, it’s such a simple issue. our fans/users want to run a program called “songbird”, that has cute farting birds as its logo.

right now i’m leaning towards a policy allowing use of our logos/branding if a certain set of basic smoke tests pass successfully. but i haven’t yet vetted that with the lawyer – so i’m crossing my fingers hoping that’s strong enough.

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3 Comments to “trademark and branding”

  1. Asa Dotzler Says:
    January 23rd, 2008 at 17:52

    I suspect that Debian will have a problem with that. They want to be able to ensure that their downstream customers don’t have any restrictions put on them about how they modify and re-distribute the software. Your smoketests would probably constitute such a restriction.

  2. Stephen Lau Says:
    January 23rd, 2008 at 18:00

    … but that becomes troublesome for any product that wants to prevent its brand from being potentially misused. For instance, with free and unfettered/unrestricted license rights to use logo/branding, someone else could take a shell script that did “cat /dev/random > /dev/sound” and put it in a script called “songbird” and give it the Songbird logo/icon, and that would be okay.

    (contrived example sure, but possible without some sort of restriction on the right to use POTI/Songbird trademarks)

  3. Asa Dotzler Says:
    January 23rd, 2008 at 18:25

    Stephen Lau, yep, exactly. That’s one of the problems we faced with Debian. We were able to make specific agreements with folks like Ubuntu, but Debian was unwilling to make an agreement with us about what could and could not be changed in Firefox because they felt that they shouldn’t be in a position to enforce that on their downstream customers (that’s how it sounded to me, anyway.)

    Interestingly enough, Debian protects its own trademark to avoid just such a problem. They call it “a bug”.

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