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Assuming you had the muscle, what's the worst a dev could theoretically hit them with? Could they be succesfully sued? DMCA?
by brador 12y ago
Assuming you had the muscle, what's the worst a dev could theoretically hit them with? Could they be succesfully sued? DMCA?
- tachion 12y agoYou do realise that there is life and even entire civilizations outside of the USA, where DMCA holds no jurisdiction and the entire idea of suing becomes much more complicated? Especially when it seems from the GitHub discussion thread the tip4commit founder lives in a place where there is no regulations regarding what is a spam and what is not. ;)
- sfk 12y agoDMCA being relevant or not, my understanding is that the takedown notice goes to the website's ISP (LINODE-US in this case).
- iolsantr 12y agoIf a project name was trademarked, you might be able to get them for trading on that name, maybe?
- brador 12y agoCan you trademark open source project names?
- pmh 12y agoI think so, yes. See Iceweasel[0], the custom Debian build of Firefox. I'm not sure that you'd be successful in using trademark law in this particular scenario though. [0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_rebranded_by_the_Debian_project#Iceweasel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_re...
- JohnTHaller 12y agoAbsolutely. Mozilla, Firefox, OpenOffice, Apache, Debian, etc are all registered trademarks and can not be used by others without permission.
- natch 12y agoAnd most famously Linux: http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4807:88wh2t.2.232 http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4807:88w...
- donaldr3 12y agoYes, in fact GPLv3 specifically deals with trademarks in section 7e).
- chx 12y agoHell yeah. Drupal trademark policy http://drupal.com/trademark http://drupal.com/trademark Apache trademark policy http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/ http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/ Eclipse trademark policy https://www.eclipse.org/legal/logo_guidelines.php https://www.eclipse.org/legal/logo_guidelines.php KDE® and the K Desktop Environment® logo are registered trademarks of KDE e.V. can't find the policy right now.
- apendleton 12y agoMaybe, but if they make it clear that they're not sponsored or endorsed by the project in question, it'd probably be considered nominative fair use, at least in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use
- iolsantr 12y agoThey are soliciting donations using the project name. I don't think that falls into nominative use. It'd be really weird if I could use the logo of the Salvation Army to solicit donations for my own organization even if I intended to give some of the donated money to them.
- wyck 12y agoIt depends on the country, in Canada you can certainly report them to the CRTC as breaking the law (CASL). http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/casl-lcap.htm http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/casl-lcap.htm Emailing someone in Canada now requires consent (various legal ways) or close personal relationship. It doesn't cost anything to report them https://services.crtc.gc.ca/pub/rapidsccm/Default-Defaut.aspx https://services.crtc.gc.ca/pub/rapidsccm/Default-Defaut.asp... . But if you really wanted to pursue them, you would have to hire a lawyer, a complaint doesn't have the same weight or speed of a legal filing. This just goes to show you has clueless the developers are with regards to international policy and law.