On Tue, 2009-01-27 at 14:49 +1100, njh wrote:
On Mon, 26 Jan 2009, Ted Gould wrote:
Thoughts after that will be to get a usage policy built that is fairly simple but ensures that Adobe can't make "Adobe Inkscape" without asking us first :)
This is extremely unlikely. On the presumption that such a lawyer thing costs real money, perhaps you should to a threat analysis to determine what the real legal threats are to inkscape. I would suggest the accidental inclusion of patented or incorrectly licenced code is far more likely a problem, and such time would be better spent on that.
Realistically, a large corp wouldn't want the bad pr that came from stealing a well known name (and would most likely be immune from attack). Small operators rebadging inkscape or using the name are not worth the effort/cost of attacking - inkscape is a very well known brand and people would quickly socially discourage such behaviour.
Yes, the cost is pretty low actually (about $500). And what I'm more worried about is small actors more than large corporations. Some guy decides he's going to make some money be licensing the Inkscape trademark and selling it back to us, or some such thing. Sure, we could probably defend it in common usage, but that'd be very expensive while the cost of just trademarking it is very cheap.
I'd agree that probably one of the bigger problems we could have is dealing with incorrectly licensed or patented code. But, that's much more expensive to determine, and something that I think we can be reasonably reactive to. If someone sends us a cease-and-desist we can remove the code or determine it's status at that time.
--Ted