Guys,
Below is discussion and attached are guidelines from our legal counsel regarding protecting the OSGeo name and logo.
Regarding 2) below, I checked with Aaron (the logo creator) and he created the compass from scratch, which was good to hear. (Nice work Aaron!)
Proposed Action:
Daniel to add "Open Source Geospatial Foundation, OSGeo, and the OSGeo logo are trademarks of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation in the and/or other countries worldwide.” after the copyright notice on the bottom of the home page.
Proposed Action Once Logo Tagline is Finalized:
Daniel creates a Logo and Usage page that hosts the logo as pdf, .ai, and .eps downloads, with the text in the attached Trademark Guidelines making up the body text of the page.
Peter
From: Jennifer Daehler
Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2006 12:16 PM
To: Peter Moran; Rich Steele (richsteele@osgeo.org)
Cc: Steele, Rich
Subject: OSGeo trademarks, guidelines & attribution
Hi Peter and Rich,
Sorry this is a long email. I want to catch you up on several trademark-related things for OSGeo.
- I am considering the following to be OSGeo trademarks:
“Open Source Geospatial Foundation”
“OSGeo”
the OSGeo logo (see attached .pdf that you sent me yesterday Peter)
and, any other tagline that OSGeo might select (if they do)
What about any trademarks/logos that individual projects might select for themselves? This isn’t really clear to me. Do you have a sense of what the intent is here? (For example MapGuide Open Source).
- Due Diligence:
-
I asked Christine to do some basic trademark searches for “Open Source Geospatial Foundation” and “OSGeo” to make sure that we weren’t treading on anybody. These came up clean based on a USPTO search and a google search.
-
it is difficult to do logo searches (either informally or by paying outside counsel a lot of money). As a result, I don’t recommend trying to do a logo search. Part of the logo is our names (and those are clean as mentioned above). The other part of the logo is a compass. This seems like a fairly generic compass, though I don’t know if the person who proposed it would have copied it from somewhere else. I think the best diligence on that might be to simply ask the person how they devised the compass. If they copied it from somebody else’s logo, that would be a problem (trademark and potentially copyright). If they copied it from somewhere else (and it wasn’t part of someone else’s logo), then there might be a question of copyright infringement, though there are certainly generic aspects to compasses that might not even be copyrightable.
- Trademark Guidelines:
- I’ve drafted the attached proposed trademark guidelines. These are really simple/common guidelines – see some comments I’ve inserted in them. If they seem appropriate, I would recommend that they be added to OSGeo.org. I’d probably create a link to them on the home page, right next to the links for “Terms of Service” and “Privacy Policy”.
- Trademark Attribution on OSGeo.org:
- I would also recommend adding the following: “Open Source Geospatial Foundation, OSGeo, and the OSGeo logo are trademarks of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation in the and/or other countries worldwide.”
This should be added as a next sentence after our copyright notice on the bottom of the home page.
- Trademark Attribution to be used by others:
- See my proposed guidelines, under “Proper Attribution”. We want others to attribute the OSGeo marks that they use to OSGeo – they’ll use a derivative of “Open Source Geospatial Foundation, OSGeo, and the OSGeo logo are trademarks of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation in the and/or other countries worldwide.”, citing only the marks that they actually use.
Let me know your thoughts.
- Jennifer
Intellectual Property Counsel
Autodesk, Inc.
San Rafael, California 94903
Direct 415 507-6553
Fax 415 507-6126
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Trademark Guidelines.doc (35.5 KB)