[Qgis-psc] Use of QGIS trademark

[Tim Sutton]

Hi

The answers to your questions are a large part of why we want to have a
trademark in place (besides the obvious protection element):

On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 2:53 PM, Martin Dobias <wonder.sk at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all.
>
> Paolo's mail about moving forward with QGIS trademark made me think
> about various aspects of the whole thing.:
>
> 1. how will be the legal entity connected to QGIS project? Will there
> be formal memberships, board (PSC members)?
>

My impression was that the PSC would form the board but that hasn't been
agreed anywhere.


>
> 2. who will be legally allowed to use QGIS trademark?
>


I think we would allow liberal useage but there would be some guidelines
such as:

* the product should not cause branch confusion (it should be made clear
when a product is a QGIS official product or the product of some other
company).
* the dude should spell it right - death to Qgis, QGis and QGIs, long live
QGIS :-)
* the logo should not be combined into another product logo (the QGIS logo
should appear separately from the product logo).




>
> 3. will we license the trademark to other parties?
>
>
License as in as for money in return for allowing someone to put the Q logo
on their product? I'd prefer to have it liberally available under our
guidelines above without charge. So No QGIS-Viagra cross licensing...


> 4. what about third parties that have already started to use QGIS name
> (e.g. QGIS cloud, QGIS enterprise) ?
>

This is a difficult one - we did discuss it in Brighton - personally I
would prefer it if these products made it clear that they are not QGIS.org
products - a hope the Sourcepole folks can see how it causes confusion. A
simple name change like Sourcepole QGIS Cloud would probably be enough to
fix things, better would be 'Sourcepole Cloud - based on QGIS' or something
like that. At the moment we are lucky in terms of it being Sourcepole that
uses this name and with who we have open dialog with and who are good
representatives of the QGIS project, but it could be a lot more difficult
if it was 'Dodgy Dan's Discount GIS and second hand car business' - and it
is exactly this situation that the trademark should give us proper leverage
to resolve.


>
> 5. will we ever enforce the trademark use and take legal actions or is
> that just for better protection in case of legal actions against the
> project?
>

I could see both cases though the latter would be more likely. One downside
to a trademark is that you have to actively and vigorously protect it or
some such lawyerese, so it is entirely likely that we don't have too much
option in the former case. However I believe there are FOSS organisations
that help in the event that it comes to suing the ass off someone. Ok I
watched too much 'Suits' and now you are all paying hte price....


Regards

Tim


> Regards
> Martin
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>



-- 
Tim Sutton - QGIS Project Steering Committee Member
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