[copyleft-next] copyleft-next 0.2.0 released

Pamela Chestek pchestek at gmail.com
Thu Feb 21 13:53:10 UTC 2013


On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:56 PM, Richard Fontana
<fontana at sharpeleven.org>wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 03:30:16PM -0800, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
>
> > >    This License does not {+grant any rights in My name, trademarks,
> service
> > >    marks, or logos.
> >
> > Not a substantial change, but I wonder why the substance is needed.
> > The grant is explicitly one of copyright. Lots of popular FLOSS
> > licenses don't mention trademark.
>
> That is true. As I think I noted on identica, I was influenced here by
> past discussions (not about this license, but FLOSS generally) with
> Pam Chestek. If she sees this, maybe she'd be willing to provide a
> better justification than I can (for why, say, the GPL might be better
> off with this kind of clause as a built-in provision - GPLv3
> explicitly authorizes such a clause as an 'additional requirement'),
> though I note that I'm solely to blame for putting this provision
> in. It was actually one of the first things I added when working from
> the GPLv3 text, as I recall.
>

I would prefer to leave it. While I have made what I believe is a
well-supported argument that open source licenses are not trademark
licenses, I don't think it's universally accepted or glaringly obvious, so
there is room for a court to decide otherwise. (The "Enigma" decision in
Germany is one example of a case where there may have been a somewhat
different outcome on trademark infringement because the product was under
an open source license.)  Most importantly, there are still many users who
have not grasped the concept that permission to use the name and the code
don't necessarily run together, so I think there is an important audience
for an express statement in the license.

Pam
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