Amarok logo copied by another site

Mark Kretschmann kretschmann at kde.org
Tue Sep 18 11:23:35 CEST 2007


On 9/18/07, Corporeal <corporeal at infinitephilosopher.com> wrote:
> To take steps to make the use and alteration of the Amarok logo
> illegal would be to go against the very nature of Free Software and
> the Create Commons license. This would be against the whole idea of
> our community.

You misunderstand the intentions behind trademarking. All big open
source projects use trademarks, for a good reason. It makes no
difference if a software is free or unfree in this regard. For example
Firefox and KDE are trademarked too. Let me give you two fictional
scenarios that could (and probably would) happen without it:

1) A company decides to get-rich-fast, creating the website
www.firefox3.com. On the site, they offer a "Firefox 3.0" for
download. The site has the exact same look of the original Firefox
site. The catch is that the program they offer is in reality malware,
installing a virus on the system. Without trademarks, the Mozilla
foundation can't do anything about it though.

2) A group of KDE haters creates a website called www.kde.info. Again,
the site has the original look of the original KDE. On the site they
spread FUD (misinformation) about KDE. Again, KDE could do absolutely
nothing about it without a trademark.

-- 
Mark


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