[Koha] Koha Trademarks

[MJ Ray]

paul POULAIN <paul.poulain at biblibre.com> wrote:
> BWS Johnson a écrit :
> > Were alternatives to Trademark discussed such as Collective Mark or 
> > Certification Mark?  Were non profit stewards considered?

Only the registrants know about their pre-registration consideration
as far as I know.  Other developers were told afterwards.

> > (While I know 
> > it is the intent for the marks to switch hands when there are users' 
> > groups functioning, is this intent in writing?)

Yes, I think eventually that was put into writing by everyone and I've
got it saved somewhere.

> > What would the 
> > conditions be for use of the mark by a non holder?

Ultimately, we don't know yet.  I suggested something like everyone
public-licensing with the OpenJDK terms, but the one-sided terms
offered late by BibLibre would have more than halved software.coop's
Koha business by cutting our geographic range, our domains and our
packaging ability.  I told Nicolas at BibLibre that on 14 April and
we've not had another offer yet.

[...]
> The idea behind the TM is that anyone would be able to TM Koha here, and 
> could then threaten us. Of course we would have proof of previous use 
> blabla, but we couldn't afford the process. oth, we could afford the 
> EUR700 that a EU trademark required.

That's fine for BibLibre.  It's much harder for anyone to use the mark
against it now.  Sadly, commercial trademark infringement doesn't need
the holder to act for it to cause problems any more, so BibLibre have
tried to put all other European Koha-distributing companies into the
position it's avoided, by spending EUR700.  Not very nice.

My view: firstly, my co-op has rights due to our efforts to promote
the name years before any of the registrants were even incorporated;
secondly, isn't Koha treated as a generic term for a family of free
software perl LMSes for a while now?  After all, it's a regular word
in a few languages and it's not like the registrants try to defend
against even blatent abuse.

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef).  LMS developer and supporter for a small, friendly
worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
(Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237