| Status | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wontfix | • werner | T3322 Set a policy for logo use | ||
| Resolved | marcus | T3019 Provide small logos for use with fingerprints on websites etc. |
Event Timeline
Talked to Michael Stehmann. First questions to be decided before estimating the efforts:
- In which countries should "GnuPG" be protected as trademark?
- For which classes do you want it?
My opinion:
Countries: EU, USA, China, Japan
--> How much effort is another country? Ideally we would like the world of course. I have no Idea what this involves though, so please give / link me basic information for any decision.
Classes: Software / IT
--> Can you give us a link which Classes are available?
Just talked to Michael Stehmann again. He added some useful thoughts. Unfortunately, he didn't agree to summarise them in 2-3 paragraphs. So I'll try...
- Is it really useful to start to protect a trademark everywhere? As it is the name of the project (charity, company, whatever), it has a basic protection in a lot of countries anyway. I.e., Apache Foundation reduced the effort to protect the trademark "Open Office" (which they got from Sun long time ago) drastically, as it doesn't solve any problem.
- As "GnuPG" contains "GNU", we might run in other problems (and: What about PG? Does it come from PGP?). Is "GNU" protected?
- For Germany (and most parts of EU, most likely) it might be easy, but a trademark investigation for US, China and Japan is the business of lawfirms. We have them at Königsallee at Düsseldorf. Do you really want to pay them?
So far the advice of Michael Stehmann, afair.
My recommendation: Let's have an informal talk with Michael Stehmann over some beers to find out the best solution, if any is needed.
That can happen at FOSDEM Saturday night at the usual bar.
In another project in the early 2000ies we had a lawyer from one of those Königsallee lawfirsm as partner. IIRC the estimated cost for a word trademark in the EU, US, and JP was in the range of 10k for just a couple of years.
I do not think that we should prioritize this right now. I had a talk with Michael and he said that we basically have the trademark because we are currently using it. To really register it and enforce it we would have to hire patent lawyers and that will easily go into 6 figure sums. Which I don't think we need right now. Let's keep it as "GnuPG is in use as a Product of g10cde".