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This makes sense from a trademark perspective, you either protect it or lose it. However I think, particularly for a project that supposedly highly values open
by jamescun 11y ago
This makes sense from a trademark perspective, you either protect it or lose it.
However I think, particularly for a project that supposedly highly values open source, to go straight to lawyers is a very poor show on Docker Inc's part. An email referring to their guidelines or even chiming in on the project/issue thread on GitHub would probably have sufficed and come across much better from a PR perspective.
I hope this serves as a warning to others regarding exactly what kind of company Docker Inc is.
- leommoore 11y agoThey could have agreed to license the trademark to the project instead. Not cool!!
- shykes 11y agoWe will probably do that (and brief our legal team to escalate any case involving open-source projects to Docker management before taking action).
- Someone1234 11y agoI am guessing the lawyer doesn't expect a lot of people to fight this (since few have the money to burn) but realistically the use of the Docker logo is likely nominative fair use[0]. > by which a person may use the trademark of another as a reference to describe the other product, or to compare it to their own. Since the Docker logo is being used to describe or in reference to Docker, it is likely a nominative defense could work. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use
- phonon 11y agoI don't think that's the issue. The issue is that FA designed their own "take" on the docker icon, which is different than the one docker uses. Your rights to manipulate someone else's trademarked logo are much more limited.
- meesterdude 11y agoyou might be right, but there is a lot of creativity out there surrounding logo manipulation. i've seen many variations of twitter, facebook, etc; to fit a given design. IANAL, but if i was running a company and people were using their own takes on my logo to reference my product, I would be flattered more than anything. If they were using it as their own, I would certainly have a problem with that. I was under the impression that it was the latter that companies would need to go after in trademark abuse. Going after the former feels... needlessly abrassive, and can turn off formerly hard-won, die-hard users.
- phonon 11y agoAll those companies have very strict branding guidelines actually. I ran into this when designing a site for a corporate customer, we had to follow all the branding/logo guidelines in the little social "connect to us" section. https://about.twitter.com/company/brand-assets https://about.twitter.com/company/brand-assets https://www.facebookbrand.com/dos-donts https://www.facebookbrand.com/dos-donts https://brand.linkedin.com/policies https://brand.linkedin.com/policies https://developers.google.com/+/branding-guidelines?hl=en https://developers.google.com/+/branding-guidelines?hl=en etc.
- phonon 11y agoAlso, open source groups protect their logos just as strongly. E.g. https://www.djangoproject.com/community/logos/ https://www.djangoproject.com/community/logos/
- Someone1234 11y agoBut that's a copyright issue, not a trademark issue, and the lawyer specifically referenced trademark usage. So while that might apply in the broader sense, that isn't what they raised.
- phonon 11y agoYes and no. If they had to sue, it would primarily be under copyright law. The impetus for all this though, is fear of weakening a distinctive trademark.