Hi, I am usually quite hesitant to add more layers of law (or lawyers) to how we interact, but I have to admit that I cannot predict the fallout from doing something like this.
Perhaps to understand things better, let's say someone wants to setup a project which improves linear algebra in Sage (I am at a summer school where Clément is about to give a talk :)) and wants to call this thing SageLin or SageMathLin. I guess if UW and William are happy with that nothing would happen. However, what if either party (UW or William) disagrees with that project for whatever reason? They could force SageLin to drop its name? Secondly, it shouldn't be a problem but to verify: having a trademark on the name does not present a problem for being included in Debian et al., right? On Thursday 31 May 2012, William Stein wrote: > Hello, > > As Sage grows, we may have to face more and more crap like [1] and > possibly attacks from others, which might force us to completely > change the name of our project to have nothing to do with "sage", > which would wreak havoc on google searches, etc. To stop this before > it is too late, I talked with a patent/trademark attorney at > University of Washington yesterday. To my pleasant surprise, they are > willing to do all the work and pay the costs associated with > trademarking Sage in some context of what we are doing (whatever turns > out to make sense from a legal perspective). They are also willing to > sell the trademark to me later, if I should so desire. Having the > trademark owned by UW instead of me personally is I think much more > useful, since UW is a huge enterprise with the resources to actually > defend the trademark. > > The current common law owners of the trademark are the community of > Sage developers. Thus I'm writing to ask if anybody who has > significantly contributed to Sage has any major objections to me > working with my university to officially trademark the name. Due to > UW's patent/trademark attorney leaving UW soon for another job, this > has to happen ASAP if it is going to happen, so please respond by ** > Monday, June 4 **. (Emailing me offlist at wst...@uw.edu is fine > too.) > > [1] http://www.sagetrac.org/ Cheers, Martin -- name: Martin Albrecht _pgp: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x8EF0DC99 _otr: 47F43D1A 5D68C36F 468BAEBA 640E8856 D7951CCF _www: http://martinralbrecht.wordpress.com/ _jab: martinralbre...@jabber.ccc.de -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
