[VisCom] FW: OSGeo trademarks, guidelines & attribution

[Arnulf Christl]

Peter Moran wrote:
> Guys,
>  
> Below is discussion and attached are guidelines from our legal counsel 
> regarding protecting the OSGeo name and logo.
>  
> Regarding 2) below, I checked with Aaron (the logo creator) and he 
> created the compass from scratch, which was good to hear. (Nice work Aaron!)
>  
> Proposed Action: 
> Daniel to add "Open Source Geospatial Foundation, OSGeo, and the OSGeo 
> logo are trademarks of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation in the 
> United States and/or other countries worldwide.” after the copyright 
> notice on the bottom of the home page.
>  
> Proposed Action Once Logo Tagline is Finalized:
> Daniel creates a Logo and Usage page that hosts the logo as pdf, .ai, 
> and .eps downloads, with the text in the attached Trademark Guidelines 
> making up the body text of the page.
>  
> Peter

Hi Peter, All,
I guess that copyrighting something costs money? If yes, from what 
budget is OSGeo going to pay that?

Arnulf.

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* Jennifer Daehler
> *Sent:* Wednesday, May 24, 2006 12:16 PM
> *To:* Peter Moran; Rich Steele (richsteele at osgeo.org)
> *Cc:* Steele, Rich
> *Subject:* OSGeo trademarks, guidelines & attribution
> 
> Hi Peter and Rich,
> 
>  
> 
> Sorry this is a long email.  I want to catch you up on several 
> trademark-related things for OSGeo. 
> 
>  
> 
> 1.  I am considering the following to be OSGeo trademarks:
> 
> “Open Source Geospatial Foundation”
> 
> “OSGeo”
> 
> the OSGeo logo (see attached .pdf that you sent me yesterday Peter)
> 
> and, any other tagline that OSGeo might select (if they do)
> 
> What about any trademarks/logos that individual projects might select 
> for themselves?  This isn’t really clear to me.  Do you have a sense of 
> what the intent is here?  (For example MapGuide Open Source). 

Hi,
we have requested this as a pending problem several weeks ago but it got 
lost because other more pressing issues. Maybe this can serve as an 
example for a project's individual logo.

The Mapbender Project has a mascot but we don't dare use it because we 
do not know whether we run into trouble. The logo and tagline can be 
found here:
http://www.mapbender.org/presentations/mapbender_homepage_logo.png

Bender is a figure from Futurama. This Bender is not a copy of the 
original but has been created from a modcaser's hompage and we have 
written consent from him that we may use it and do whatever we want. 
Problem is that it highly resembles the original figure from the TV 
series and this is why we don't use it anymore. Any ideas how to proceed?

> 2.  Due Diligence:
> 
> - I asked Christine to do some basic trademark searches for “Open Source 
> Geospatial Foundation” and “OSGeo” to make sure that we weren’t treading 
> on anybody.  These came up clean based on a USPTO search and a google 
> search.  
> 
>  
> 
> - it is difficult to do logo searches (either informally or by paying 
> outside counsel a lot of money).  As a result, I don’t recommend trying 
> to do a logo search.  Part of the logo is our names (and those are clean 
> as mentioned above).  The other part of the logo is a compass.  This 
> seems like a fairly generic compass, though I don’t know if the person 
> who proposed it would have copied it from somewhere else.  I think the 
> best diligence on that might be to simply ask the person how they 
> devised the compass.  If they copied it from somebody else’s logo, that 
> would be a problem (trademark and potentially copyright).  If they 
> copied it from somewhere else (and it wasn’t part of someone else’s 
> logo), then there might be a question of copyright infringement, though 
> there are certainly generic aspects to compasses that might not even be 
> copyrightable.   
> 
>  
> 
> 3.  Trademark Guidelines:
> 
> - I’ve drafted the attached proposed trademark guidelines.  These are 
> really simple/common guidelines – see some comments I’ve inserted in 
> them.  If they seem appropriate, I would recommend that they be added to 
> OSGeo.org.  I’d probably create a link to them on the home page, right 
> next to the links for “Terms of Service” and “Privacy Policy”.    
> 
>  
> 
> 4.  Trademark Attribution on OSGeo.org:
> 
> - I would also recommend adding the following: “Open Source Geospatial 
> Foundation, OSGeo, and the OSGeo logo are trademarks of the Open Source 
> Geospatial Foundation in the United States and/or other countries 
> worldwide.”
> 
> This should be added as a next sentence after our copyright notice on 
> the bottom of the home page.
> 
>  
> 
> 5.  Trademark Attribution to be used by others:
> 
> - See my proposed guidelines, under “Proper Attribution”.  We want 
> others to attribute the OSGeo marks that they use to OSGeo – they’ll use 
> a derivative of “Open Source Geospatial Foundation, OSGeo, and the OSGeo 
> logo are trademarks of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation in the 
> United States and/or other countries worldwide.”, citing only the marks 
> that they actually use. 
> 
>  
> 
> Let me know your thoughts. 
> 
>  
> 
> - Jennifer
> 
> * ** *
> 
> 
> *Jennifer Daehler*
> Intellectual Property Counsel  
>  
> 
> Autodesk, Inc.
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> 
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