ubuntu-community

We need a publicly available list of approved trademark uses

Bug #394328 reported by David D Lowe
24
This bug affects 4 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
ubuntu-community
In Progress
High
Jono Bacon

Bug Description

There needs to be a publicly available list of approved uses of the Ubuntu trademark on either ubuntu.com or canonical.com . This will help users determine whether the use of the trademark on other sites is indeed officially endorsed or officially permitted with minimal effort.

Real case scenario:
User visits http://www.ubuntumagazine.net/ , a website about Ubuntu Linux. There is nothing on the site to indicate that the use of the word "Ubuntu" in the title or the domain name has been approved. The site seems to violate the trademark policy, but Canonical could have given the site special privileges. The user could be led to believe that the site is indeed official, there's no quick and easy way for him or her to verify that.

Tags: trademark
Revision history for this message
Jono Bacon (jonobacon) wrote :

Thanks for filing this bug, David.

I also agree that it would be useful to have a list of those people who are using the trademark within the expectations of the policy. The Canonical trademarks team have also started sending out granted license documents (via email) to clarify that a given entity has a license.

Fortunately, there is already work in progress in providing to a reasonable degree what you feel is important here. We will ask those people who the Ubuntu trademarks to add their details to a wiki page that the Canonical trademarks team subscribe to, and the team will send out a license document if they are within the expectations of the trademark policy.

You should see some more details on this over the coming few weeks.

Changed in ubuntu-community:
assignee: nobody → Jono Bacon (jonobacon)
importance: Undecided → High
status: New → Confirmed
status: Confirmed → In Progress
Revision history for this message
Nathan Handler (nhandler) wrote :

Jono,

What is the status of this bug? Has the wiki page been created yet?

braulioareis (braulioareis)
Changed in ubuntu-community:
status: In Progress → Opinion
Revision history for this message
David D Lowe (flimm) wrote :

@braulioareis: Practically all the bugs filed under the "ubuntu-community" project could be filed as "opinion", which would make this bug tracker pretty useless. Can we leave the status of the bug as "in progress" unless you have evidence that Jono Bacon has decided not to pursue this any more?

Changed in ubuntu-community:
status: Opinion → In Progress
Revision history for this message
phil (philjackson316) wrote :

I would be interested to see a clear simple policy, and maybe an on-line licence request form such as that used by the Linux Foundation.
I have just set up a non-profit organisation details are at www.fernhillLINUXproject.com and will be using the ubuntu trademark as part of the project.
Having read the copyright policy at http://www.ubuntu.com/aboutus/trademarkpolicy, and also intending to credit 3rd party content / trademarks to their author / owner I believe it is acceptable and appropriate to use the trademark, but a license would make me feel better.
I have applied to the Linux Foundation Linux Mark program to use the LINUX trademark using their on-line form.

Revision history for this message
phil (philjackson316) wrote :

Okay, so sometimes things are not obvious until they are obvious, having visited http://www.ubuntu.com/aboutus/trademarkpolicy again, I clicked "contact us", to query my use of the trademark and was presented with a form to apply for a licence. :o)

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