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"In the US at least, you do not need to register a trademark to enforce it... and one of the specific things trademark law lets you do is prevent people from mi

"In the US at least, you do not need to register a trademark to enforce it... and one of the specific things trademark law lets you do is prevent people from misrepresenting the origin of a product bearing that name." Unless you register, you cannot sue for damages and you are limited to state courts. So how do you prevent people from using your mark? You apply for an injunction. You would have to do this in every state where you want to enforce the mark. If you target multiple states, you would likely need multiple lawyers. How many of those free software authors will want to pay for this legal expense? Until you succeed in getting your injunctions, and there is no guarantee you will succeed, there is no incentive for someone to stop using an unregistered mark. Whatever damage they cause cannot be recovered under a claim based on trademark law.

geofft 7y ago
Sure, but free software projects typically do not work based on the principle of "What's the worst they can do in court" or "Are they really going to sue us," they work on the principle of "What are we actively and explicitly allowed to do." Otherwise they'd have no worries about incorporating clearly abandoned code, or incorporating code with an unclear license and not selling it knowing that they can always reply to a lawyer letter with "Oops, sorry." Otherwise Beerware and WTFPL and the JSON license would be free software licenses. It's quite clear that Mozilla isn't interested in suing Hyperbola or any other free software distro for being a distro and doing distro things, and that in the worst case, they'd send a nice message first and Hyperbola could choose to discontinue distributing Firefox and Rust. Yet Hyperbola wants to take the "explicit permission" principle to an extreme and discontinue distributing them now, proactively. They should be consistent and cease distributing everything else.

geofft 7y ago

Sure, but free software projects typically do not work based on the principle of "What's the worst they can do in court" or "Are they really going to sue us," they work on the principle of "What are we actively and explicitly allowed to do." Otherwise they'd have no worries about incorporating clearly abandoned code, or incorporating code with an unclear license and not selling it knowing that they can always reply to a lawyer letter with "Oops, sorry." Otherwise Beerware and WTFPL and the JSON license would be free software licenses. It's quite clear that Mozilla isn't interested in suing Hyperbola or any other free software distro for being a distro and doing distro things, and that in the worst case, they'd send a nice message first and Hyperbola could choose to discontinue distributing Firefox and Rust. Yet Hyperbola wants to take the "explicit permission" principle to an extreme and discontinue distributing them now, proactively. They should be consistent and cease distributing everything else.