Comments on: Feed icon madness

By: Chris Messina

Chris Messina — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Hey Dave — good points and summary of the issue at hand. I’m hoping that Mozilla’s pursuit of this issue will lead to the option of using the community mark concept to publish symbols and marks that communities identify themselves by.

It’s unclear whether trademark law as it stands will permit this kind of free-use, especially when community enforcement is actually *much* more effective and cost efficient than traditional legal remedies that tend to drag on forever and leave all sides raw.

I’m not anti-trademark, but I am pro-choice, in the IP sense. Copyright has an alternative in Creative Commons; why shouldn’t trademark?

By: Chris Heuer

Chris Heuer — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Perhaps there is a way to set up a Community Mark Legal Support System, where the organization (or foundation) can collect money on behalf of a given mark which will go towards registering the mark officially. Lawyers could contribute pro-bono over the net to remotely contribute their expertise – adopting a given mark to usher through the process. The community tools could enable members of the community to donate money via any number of methods and work towards establishing some generally acceptable guidelines for the usage of community marks in a manner similar to Creative Commons’ process. Enforcement can be done via automated diiscovery systems and through community reporting / policing – dispute resolution processes could also be established in this regards.

I would think there must be a creative solution in here somewhere, just a matter of time before it becomes clear.

Not my area of expertise, just my .02

By: mini-me

mini-me — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

What’s with the “As Luis pointed out” link? Is that a clever hax0r attempt?

By: Dave Neary

Dave Neary — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

mini-me: corrected now. Not a ha><0r thing – just a rogue C&P.

By: Chris Messina

Chris Messina — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

But Chris, the whole point is to *not* rely on the cumbersome and costly legal system… it’s about having a choice — opening your mark up to community protection is not a legal guarentee of anything: it’s half economic and half an act of faith. And it shows great courage on the part of the entity that does open it up since the community could indeed take the mark in the wrong direction… but c’est la vie — if the community you’re serving doesn’t endorse your use of the mark or agree with your intentions, you have a larger problem than enforcing the “proper” use of a symbol. M’kay?

By: Dave Neary

Dave Neary — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

But Chris (2), the whole point of trying to find some imaginative solution within the legal framework is to have a stick for the bad guy who sets up a porn site with your logos and tells you and the community to go screw yourselves (while looking at his site, preferably).

I refuse to believe that the “abandonment” mentioned in US trademark law means “the first time anyone uses your trademarks, and you know about it, and you don’t stop them from using it, you lose the mark” – surely as trademark holder, you get to have some say about how the mark gets used, including the ability to say “all the following uses are fine by me – fire ahead”?