Daniel Stender <deb...@danielstender.com> writes: > I've asked about its copyright on Mentors before and the consensus was > that by the trademark policy [2] it's considered to be freely > distributable, but *might* violate the DFSG. > > I'm seeking now for an "official" statement before this is going to be > put in the new queue.
That isn't going to come from a discussion here; “official” statements can only come from the officials responsible for the Debian archive: the FTP masters. To the best of my knowledge, the FTP masters don't generally make pronouncements on individual releases before they're uploaded to Debian. So the way to get an “official” pronouncement is to make a new package and upload it to the NEW queue. However, this forum is an *unofficial* resource to discuss legal issues of prospective Debian packages, and hopefully discover problems before hitting the NEW queue, for the benefit of package maintainers and the FTP masters. So let's see whether we can help. > [2] https://www.python.org/psf/trademarks/ Trademark law generally restricts all “use” of a trademark work, with some exceptions. That general restriction violates DFSG §1, §2, §3, §6, and maybe others. So unless Debian and its recipients have explicit license to do the actions specified in the DFSG, we can generally assume no permission. I am not aware of whether the Debian project does anything but ignore these violations in the general case of trademark works in Debian. What does the PSF's trademark policy grant? The “Uses that Never Require Approval” section grants permission to all recipients. The permission only allows “to name the trademarked entity in a way that is minimal and does not imply a sponsorship relationship with the trademark holder.” The “Uses that Always Require Approval” explicitly restricts “Any commercial use of the PSF trademarks in product or company names”, and “Any use of a derived (modified) logo for any commercial purpose”. These each violate §6 at minimum. So by my reading, the PSF's trademark policy fails to grant the necessary permissions for PSF-trademark works to be free under the DFSG. This is not much of a surprise; trademark restrictions tend to conflict with the requirements of the DFSG. The trademark policy for Debian's own trademarks <URL:https://www.debian.org/trademark> toes a rather narrow line, and grants quite broad permissions compared to most. -- \ “A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of | `\ five.” —Groucho Marx | _o__) | Ben Finney -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/854mphsm5g....@benfinney.id.au
