On Thursday 20 January 2005 17:38, Raul Miller wrote: > On Thu, Jan 20, 2005 at 02:17:11AM -0800, Michael K. Edwards wrote: > > Agreed. But use of a brand name to attempt to stop other people from > > giving away the same thing you do under the same name is a bit of a > > novelty. > > Advertisers have been doing this for years, as have broadcasters. >
Hi I just signed up to this list today, a discussion somewhere else about Debian and trademarks led me here. It's nice to see some FSF doubters (I have just been reading this thread in the archives) and questioning of their speech based copyright vision. I think I agree with Micahel that precedent is fairly against the FSF and Lessig views of the proper interpretation of copyright. Its also nice to see some people talking about how TMs and other things might restrict the "freeness" of open source. There has been too much junk said by people that it purely a licence issue and everything else including US Export Regulations dont interfere with the freedom of the licence! Anyway, has anyone here ever thought obout the way open source is produced and organsied in terms of trusts or fiduciary obligations? I was in a series of Aboriginal art acses in Australia. the last one the court found that "the traditional owners of the corpus of ritual knowledge" from which an artwork was derived painter and sold by an artist from their group had an equitable right to restrain 3rd parties. I have done a bit of thinking trying to think of another way of looking at open source other than straight copyright/contract law and it seems to have similarities with this Aboriginal situation - their is a community of knowledge producers who produce in common the stuff of their life, they are all able subject to certain internal protocols to distribute, sell, produce and reproduce, but equity restrains them or any third party (even with only implied notice) from using the knowledge in a manner inconsistent with their tradition and internal protocols. A system of trust operates within the community of producers and users which is sufficently well known to bind third parties not to use the material in a manner inconsistent with the communities principles. I am not sure if that is food for thought or not. I can go on, but maybe thats enough to say hello. martin -- :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: "the riddle which man must solve, he can only solve in being, in being what he is and not something else...." http://auskadi.tk :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
