How others have dealt with logo trademarks...

[Jo Walsh]

dear VisCom, Board,

I heard a fun story at the FLOSS Foundations pre-OSCON meeting.
Eclipse released their logo artwork under their EPL (BSD-style)
license. Quite a few random, non-software-related companies called
"eclipse" started using the artwork. Mike Milinkovich their ED
showed a little gallery of re-usage, entertainingly proud of it:

 http://milinkovich.blogspot.com/2006/01/brand-hijacked.html
 http://www.eclipse.org/artwork/
 
I asked him about it and he said Eclipse would definitely have
benefited from getting guidelines sorted out early on, and that
personally he thought the Mozilla Foundation had got the TM/reuse
guidelines spot on:

 http://www.eclipse.org/legal/logo_guidelines.php
 http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/

His commentary: [[
Now the interesting wrinkle in all this is that the phenomenon we're
seeing with the Eclipse logos is operating at the intersection of
copyright and trademark law. The trademark law only protects the logos
in a particular field of endeavour (e.g. software, real estate, courier
services). So no one could use the Eclipse logo for software. But
because we made the bits available under the EPL, people can and do use them in
other fields. That can be a perfectly reasonable thing to do. ]]

hth, hand, ianal,


jo

ps - the eclipse.org site strikes me as a really fine example of a
foundation website - sets everything out very clean and clearly.