Practical Trademark Law For FOSS Projects
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FOSS Backstage 20225 / 39
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Source codeInformation technology consultingImage registrationInternet forumProjective planeRevision controlOpen sourceProduct (business)System callSoftware developerService (economics)CodeDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Right anglePhysical lawSelf-organizationSymbol tableOnline helpOracleKey (cryptography)WebsiteMultiplication signMereologyQuicksortChannel capacityGroup action1 (number)EmailSoftwareSet (mathematics)Latent heatSource codeWindows RegistryImage registrationFunctional (mathematics)Medical imagingBookmark (World Wide Web)BitTerm (mathematics)Process (computing)Copyright infringementConsistencySurjective functionTouchscreenOpen setMeeting/InterviewComputer animation
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ConsistencyImage registrationService (economics)Similarity (geometry)Group actionTerm (mathematics)Line (geometry)Projective planeGreatest elementComputing platformOpen sourceProduct (business)Endliche ModelltheorieInformation technology consultingElectronic mailing listPresentation of a groupBitSoftwareDatabase transactionAreaLikelihood functionRight angleQuicksortCASE <Informatik>SpacetimeSource codeSoftware developerDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Multiplication signProcess (computing)Food energyImage registrationPoint (geometry)Physical lawMereologyCopyright infringementCausalityEnterprise architectureOnline helpOpen setComputer animation
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Performance appraisalCopyright infringementSoftwareComponent-based software engineeringProjective planeProduct (business)Endliche ModelltheorieFlow separationSelf-organizationRight angleParameter (computer programming)BitPhysical lawPlug-in (computing)Digital rights managementTerm (mathematics)CASE <Informatik>Position operatorNormal (geometry)Point (geometry)Software frameworkOpen sourceWeb 2.01 (number)Perspective (visual)Software developerSoftwareSoftware maintenanceSoftware bugEnterprise architectureBuildingCodeDivisorDivision (mathematics)MathematicsDecision theoryNumberQuicksortNuclear spaceSheaf (mathematics)Slide ruleMessage passingMultiplication signPatch (Unix)OntologyDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Traffic reportingComputer animation
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Copyright infringementPerformance appraisalSoftwareComponent-based software engineeringMultiplication signNumberRevision controlBitDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Sheaf (mathematics)Right angleOffice suiteSource codeOpen sourceTerm (mathematics)Bookmark (World Wide Web)Self-organizationProjective planeProduct (business)SpacetimeQuicksortTouch typingSoftwareArithmetic meanService (economics)Web 2.01 (number)Image registrationGame theoryDistribution (mathematics)Point (geometry)Musical ensembleCondition numberTheory of everythingSymbol tableOSI modelView (database)Entire functionDigital rights managementDatabaseClosed setFreewareNP-hardAbsolute valueOpen setComputer animation
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Goodness of fitWeb pageLink (knot theory)Slide ruleProjective planeComputer animationMeeting/Interview
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:04
OK, I think it's up to me for a kickoff as moderator, so thank you again for putting up with me. Great to meet you, Shane. Can you hear me? Yeah? Great. OK. So this is more dynamic than my previous talks. I hope you enjoy it more.
00:23
And it's a more fun issue about trademarks with a more fun person through Shane. So Shane doesn't really need introducing. Shane is a major member of the Apache Software Foundation and various other initiatives. But we're onto trademarks. So trademarks has nothing to do with licensing, nothing to do with open source licensing. Trademark is the brand name that you put on a project. You call it Mozilla, call it what you want.
00:45
And what trademark law does is if you register the trademark and in some places unregistered marks, let's not have a fight. Yeah, exactly. You get you get you get Monopoly right to use that name for the specific products and services that you that you you registered for.
01:06
OK. In the territory where you live. So it's territorial. It's not international. It's a specific set of products and services. And it gives you the monopoly. So, you know, obviously, Mozilla Foundation has the monopoly of using the Mozilla brand name, which cause all sorts
01:22
of problems with Iceweasel and Debbie and all that, because it does give them control over use of the brand. And it doesn't protect code. It doesn't protect patent functionality. What it protects is the reputation and the image and the identification of of that brand with that entity in that product.
01:41
So that's just the intro. That's the legal bit. And now handing over to Shane to say, because actually this does impact open source, because obviously all our open source favorite products all have trademarks. They will have funny logos, you know, with blow fishes and feathers and all sorts of things. So they're an important part of recognizing who we are and being part of this community.
02:04
Shane, over to you. Great. And I can tell Malcolm is coming from the legal side because this is practical trademark law. So right. There's the law out there. And a lot of times when you ask a lawyer or somebody in a big corporation for some advice, they come in from the law side, which is important, certainly.
02:23
But for a lot of us in open source projects, especially community led ones where we're volunteers, what's important is practical advice. So before we entertain questions, which I'm hoping will have some, I know we will already. I wanted to talk about in terms of if you're an open source group or if you're a
02:41
commercial company looking to partner with or use open source, like, you know, we have had plenty of discussions. There are some practical questions about how open source needs to think about it. And these are you know, there are a lot of legal details that often volunteers don't really have the capacity or time to deal with. But these are practical things that if you can update your website, if you can answer your
03:03
e-mails, these will help you get ready to defend your mark or to properly use other marks. So the first one is consistent marks. So as engineers, we often use, you know, we often use code names for our projects and for different releases and talk about all the cool code.
03:23
But what's really important, as Malcolm said, is the trademark is the brand that you present to the public, that everybody else knows how to find you. So the most important thing for any project, I think, is to use your names consistently. Call it Mozilla Firefox and don't have a different name in there or don't have version names and
03:43
use trademark symbols because those help show other people that you're serious about your trademark belongs to your organization. So that's the first practical step, right, that you can do that without a lawyer. Just update your website to be consistent in terms of how you talk about your own brand.
04:02
Another key question that's different for open source versus corporations, usually for community projects, let me rephrase that, or foundation projects is what's your organization's reputation in the larger ecosystem? So when, you know, Oracle or Microsoft go out with some product, they have a huge reputation along with plenty of lawyers, right?
04:22
So they don't need to worry about people trying to misuse their brands because they know that they'll be able to defend them. But a lot of smaller projects don't have that right yet, right? Within your own group of engineers or people who work on a particular kind of data streaming, people will know you.
04:41
But beyond that, do they know your organization, your project, not just the software, but the people behind it? That's a key point because at a place like Apache, while the world may not understand who Apache is, software developers do. So if someone misuses one of our brands, we can find software developers and companies to say, hey, you know, you can't do that.
05:04
Tell your lawyers you really can't. But smaller projects have a hard time with that. So one of the things long term I want to explore is how we can help smaller projects do a better job of promoting themselves and ensuring that they can own their own trademarks.
05:20
The flip side of your reputation is how organized can your community be at reporting infringements? So sometimes we call this policing your trademark, right? So you've got this great brand, maybe it's called Hadoop, right, with a little yellow elephant, which is up there on top of my screen somewhere. And you're using it as a consistent brand.
05:43
But of course, everybody else is starting to also talk about Hadoop or making add-ons for Hadoop. If they start saying, hey, we've got great Hadoop, buy it from us, how organized will your community be? And actually finding that out, one. And then of course, two, either they don't know it's your trademark or they don't care because they think they can make money or whatever.
06:06
How do you then in an organized fashion tell them, hey, no, this is our trademark, we have some rights in it, we've marked it, you need to stop. So that's a key thing. Our communities are often good at ensuring the build is still running and that
06:20
when the build pipeline has a failure, we fix that or answering user questions. But our communities aren't as good at having leadership or even the people to be organized following up on these things. In particular, when you talk to a corporation about misusing your brand, you're often going to be
06:43
talking to somebody who is not an open source person and they're going to say, who are you? Why should I care? So that's a key question is, does your community have the capacity to really go out and police your marks? So earlier, Malcolm mentioned registrations.
07:00
So registrations are great. They are an official way that various national governments have a registry of trademarks and what the trademark is for a specific product, whether it's clothing like Hawaiian shirts or whether it's software, whether it's cars. And who the source of that product is.
07:22
A trademark is about people understanding that Hadoop software comes from Apache. Right. So if you can get a registration, which doesn't require a lawyer, but they certainly help, then you have much, much stronger rights than if you're simply using a consistent name and calling it your trademark. And of course, as Malcolm also mentioned, this varies by country.
07:43
So we have a bunch of countries that are first to file where whoever files with the national registry for a trademark will typically get it first. We also have countries like the US, which are first to use. So in the US, if you are consistently using a name for your software, you can accrue common law rights.
08:05
And those will be valuable if you have to sue somebody, which we hope you never have to, because that's not a fun thing. A key thing here is if you're a smaller project, it's worth exploring trying to get a registration. If you're if you know what your brand is and you know, you can sort of support being consistent with it.
08:25
It doesn't need to be that expensive. In many countries, you can actually file without a lawyer. And it's only, you know, several hundred dollars. If you can afford a lawyer, it certainly will make the process much easier. And of course, will reduce risk because just filing for a registration doesn't mean it'll be granted.
08:43
Once you file, it will take anywhere from three months to probably three years to actually have it granted. Presuming, of course, nobody complains. But they're like insurance. And the trick with insurance is you won't need know that you needed it until it's too late.
09:02
Because it is a much, much stronger defense against someone trying to misuse your brand. And the last important question is, don't go to court, because for any of us here in a community open source project, right?
09:20
For anybody, you know, except possibly for somebody at the Linux Foundation, because they're pretty big in terms of a foundation led project. If you're going to court, you already lost. You've lost too much money in legal fees. You've lost too much of your volunteer energy because. Following up on these kind of things, especially in a court or especially with working with
09:41
corporate lawyers, requires to be on point, requires being very professional and following lots of details. And that's a lot of energy that our projects could use someplace else. So I have some examples and some other foundations have examples of all the simple ways that you can protect your mark if somebody's misusing it.
10:01
And a key flip side to this is. In most cases, if your project has some reputation, then most companies who might be misusing your mark will actually back down if you approach them the right way. Again, trademarks are about people finding a specific product by the name and then finding the source of that product.
10:26
Who actually makes it? And in a lot of cases, corporations who are trying to partner with or sort of steamroller over open source projects want to be known in that space. They both want to sell to users. Right. Which is why they're trying to capitalize on your
10:41
cool name. But they also want to be able to sell to developers in that technology space. So a lot of times if your company, if your project can push back on the corporation on a private side saying, hey, no, most key developers actually know it comes from us. Right. Nobody, nobody who's a developer or contributor is going to actually believe that it's coming from you.
11:04
Those kind of things actually do work. And that's that's kind of different than in the corporate world of trademarks, where there it's marketing budgets and lawyers who are happy to, you know, have a lawsuit if it's better for their bottom line. In open source, it's all about reputation and, you know, having making sure your project
11:22
is a place that new contributors will come to help build more of your project. Right. That's what open source is about is making sure our project will live longer by having more people help us build this great stuff. So those are the practical things that every open source group can do just with the volunteers you already have.
11:41
It just takes a tiny, tiny little bit of work on presentation, on, you know, being consistent and seeing how other people use your brand so that you can keep your good reputation. So I just want to go over the practical sides, the really simple things that project communities can do without having a lawyer, without necessarily having a lot of experience in this.
12:04
And then we can, of course, take questions. I have a whole list of trademark topics here, including some great trademark resources. There are, for example, the model trademark guidelines. If you don't know how to have a policy like you want to start improving your brand and you don't know how to set it up, there's a model trademark guidelines website with the policy under an open license.
12:27
You can just copy it. Right. Put your name on it. Put the policy out. You're done in terms of a policy for how to use your mark. So there are resources out there. It's just we haven't all thought to go find them yet. And I want to be able to help people find those things.
12:43
So that's enough of me talking. And let's see what what area people want to start start talking about. I'm just checking on here. Yeah. If there are no questions, can I ask you a practical question? Because, you know, I've obviously I disagree totally with what you say about not having lawyers, not giving us work.
13:06
You know, poor lawyers, destitute. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. You're a Shakespeare believer. You know, kill the lawyers, whatever. No, I agree with you. Anything you can do to avoid legal legal transaction costs in an open source community is good because you do need legal quality there.
13:23
And the whole idea about open source is to be, you know, easy, easy. Quick question here. What's the what's the line? Was it easy? Was it easy for projects to see the line between permitted non-commercial use like making reference to something and non-permitted commercial use?
13:41
So the hundreds of people who are Hadoop consultants, they have expertise in Hadoop, you know, they may even build platforms using Hadoop. Where do they draw? Where do you, in practical terms, because I know I know what line is legal terms, but in practical terms, where would you see the line between what they can comfortably do without worrying the Hadoop people and what actually gets the wrong side of them?
14:02
I think we talk about that out here. So essentially, on the legal side, the question is the likelihood of confusion, right? Yeah, exactly. Some other consultant is making this great Hadoop speed up product and they use Hadoop in the name. Well, people know that Hadoop actually comes from Apache, right? So obviously in the legal side, as long as if somebody else is talking about your product, using your product's name, that's fine.
14:26
That's typically called nominative use, maybe different in different countries. But that's when they're, you know, I'm talking about how great a consultant I am at making your Hadoop software work better. Right. That's fine because we have to talk about Hadoop by calling it Hadoop.
14:41
The trick is when they, when the perception of how they're doing that makes people think that they should go download Hadoop from that consultant instead. Right. That's that's one part of it. And the other part of it, obviously, is if we actually just had a case where somebody was, you know, providing Apache Camel for the enterprise software, right, they provided download, called Apache Camel for enterprise. And of course, it was their software, right?
15:06
It had Camel inside, but they added a lot of software on it and they called it Apache Camel for enterprise. That's not OK because Campbell is our trademark, the Apache's trademark. So there's a difference between Camel inside and being called Camel, you know, in that sense.
15:21
Yes. OK. Yeah. So infringement is when somebody is using a trademark that will cause consumers, like somebody who might want to download the software, use it to understand, to think that they're providing the software instead of us. Telling the difference between the two is not always obvious, but I do have an answer for every question here about is this use OK?
15:47
It depends. Yeah, of course. You're you're you're you're like a lawyer. You're as bad as we are ashamed in that sense. Yeah. Between economists, economists and lawyers, we all just say it all depends. You mentioned you mentioned, but I don't follow up to the the the the two things that
16:05
are important things there are one is does the open source project have a policy about this? Yeah. Yes, of course, the ASF has a detailed policy that I wrote 10 years ago. We also have in the resources section of my slides, which will be up on the Web shortly.
16:22
I wrote up from a from an open source perspective. It's how Apache works, but it works for almost everybody. How to think about you see something that seems like a misuse, right? I have a I have a reporting guidelines of, OK, is this actually an Apache project name or trademark?
16:41
Well, OK, then let's if it is, then let's think about it. How are they using it? What are they using it to refer to? Are they using it in, you know, in obvious marketing to say download some software about patchy camel or are they saying it about a technique for for improving Campbell by adding this code? Right. So there are a whole bunch of factors there in terms of what you might want to report and then actually hopefully get a change.
17:06
But that, of course, depends on your project. Right. Different projects have different guidelines, especially when it comes to consulting and to add ons and so on. So in terms of software products, somebody wants to download a software product.
17:24
Apache is very stringent about you cannot call your product a patchy camel. You can't call it a patchy camel for enterprise or whatever. Right. Which which most projects have. But we do have a very specific way. If you want to build plugins for camel, you can build your, you know, zebra plugin for Apache camel.
17:46
And you can use that as your product name. Right. Because that makes a distinction between your product. Right. You have the zebra plugin and our framework, Apache camel, that does your messaging. It's OK if you put the name stealer like that because.
18:01
Consumers understand software comes with plugins, comes with frameworks that then add on top of each other. Right. So we explicitly allow that use, but there needs to be a distinction between your product and our product. So that's something that Apache lets you do that normal trademark law probably wouldn't.
18:20
Right. Because we want to we that's our point where we want to share our products, but we want to get credit. That's the big thing. And that's where having a policy really helps even for your own community to understand. You know, should we worry about this or not? So that's one of the key things about being consistent.
18:41
And if your projects organized enough, just go copy the model trademark guidelines. Right. That's a great place to start or, you know, copy patches. Several organizations have essentially. Does that make sense? And certainly to me, I hope the community that there's a question here in the in the chat, which is sometimes it's easier for companies to ignore trademarks, especially if you've gotten away with it in the past.
19:05
It's less hassle because you don't have to care about it. Are there any incentives or arguments to get actually to get companies to do the right thing? Yeah. So it sounds like chasing people to comply with open source licenses as well. No, I'm just getting. Yes. And one one thing here,
19:24
a lot of people don't think through is there are really there are two completely separate ways to approach this. So if if somebody comes up and asks Malcolm, who is a lawyer, then you're going to say, OK, well, we're going to write them a friendly letter on our corporate letterhead saying, hey, you're breaking the law.
19:40
This is our trademark law. Maybe you'll send an official CND letter about cease and desist. That's one way. The other way is the practical way, right? When you send something that sounds like it's from a lawyer, it will go to the corporation. We'll go to the lawyers, the corporation. And if they, for example, look up your project trademark, it's not registered.
20:02
They'll say, oh, they don't really have any rights. Who cares? Right. It'll be a legal decision on the company's side. And that's not what we want. Right. Because they often don't understand. They may not understand that open source is a separate thing. They may think it's their own companies. The practical way is to find the the technical and business leaders around that technology in the company and say, hey, this is our trademark.
20:26
We do have legal rights. Number one. But number two, people know us. And if you're going to start abusing our mark, we're going to go public about it. One thing. Right. Maybe we'll cut off your contributors. So the it's it's very, very rare.
20:45
But one of the sort of nuclear switches at Apache is especially not just for a simple trademark violation, but for for really complicated ones where a company really, you know, writes all this marketing that might not might not tactically be infringing,
21:04
but clearly is giving the impression that they run such and such a patchy product. Apache at some point will say, you know, your company is not playing fair and we have these legal rights, but we're probably not going to sue because it's not worth us. But we're going to cut you out of the project.
21:21
Effectively, right, whether whether publicly or privately and that, you know, once you get that message that, hey, we're happy as long as you fix it. But if you're not going to fix it, you need to give them time to. These things don't aren't quick. Say, hey, you know, the technical community knows who we really are.
21:42
And and once we tell them about it, they're not going respect you. Right. We're going to cut you off from all the shared benefits of having maintenance and bugs together. So that's the other one is you really need to. But that again requires some organization in your project. Right. You really need a project council that can say, OK, yes, this is a serious issue.
22:01
We've contacted them privately. They still haven't fixed it. We need to think about, you know, what other leverage we have and their technical ones. Right. That the developers of that company will care because. Right. Maybe their reputation is partly from their work in open source. The developers. And the other one is really it's the the product manager for that commercial division.
22:25
Right. Whoever is making the business decisions. You get the senior tactical person to go talk to the manager who's like, we can make, you know, more ROI on our product. We capitalize on this name and the technical person talks to them, not the lawyer, and says, no, we're going to lose the reputation long term.
22:43
That's the right place to make that kind of thing. That's issues with open source versus corporations is the legal path is going to be too hard for us to really go through on in most cases. OK, that's true. More and more positively, it's actually I mean, there's so many people have so many trademarks this day.
23:04
Is there a practical, easy way for someone choosing a name for their project to to avoid all the pitfalls of of, you know, someone choosing another open source project's name or even a commercial, even worse, a commercial product's name? Do you have kind of like practical recommendations about how to go choose your name, your project's name?
23:21
Yeah, we actually have I keep thinking I should sort of tweak the documentation to make it generic and just give it out. We have a project name search policy at Apache. Right. So any new project that comes to us, whether they're existing with the name or not, proposes their name. They actually put it in a JIRA ticket, which is actually public.
23:42
And then there's a there's a step for that volunteer community. Right. So they're they're not lawyers. They're not going to have a lawyer. Well, essentially, you know, do the simple web searches. Right. Look through GitHub for other common places you'd find the name. Right. Number one. And then number two, do a very basic at least USPTO, US patent office, patent and trademark office search on the name.
24:05
Right. We don't do an exhaustive search because our volunteers aren't going to have the usually won't have the expertise to do that. And we're certainly not going to pay a lawyer for each of our 200 plus projects. Because in terms of. You know, it depends a little on what your long term goals for the name are.
24:26
Right. Is this something you're going to make into a world dominating thing that you also want to make consulting money off of? So it's really important. Or is this something you just want to get out there and, you know, find enough contributors to be able to maintain it long term?
24:41
So the key thing is not stepping on somebody else's toes. Right. And the less important thing, which is different for corporations, is how strong of a name is it? Right. Because usually, you know, there aren't that many really big trademark conflicts with most of those products because they're, you
25:02
know, a little bit niche in terms of like the people really interested in the software are going to be technical. And they'll understand the technical differences like right that corporations. Yeah. In my experience, it's mainly actually when when that open source is by mistake, chosen the name of a practical software, because they're in the same space. And obviously, that causes problems to just put my foot in that the European Trademark Registration Office,
25:24
the IPO has has got a great tool called TM view, if people want to look at it. And that was worldwide includes Korea, Japan, all sorts of countries, because, you know, even even if you think that you're, you know, an open source project in Germany, and you're running a look at Germany trademark, that's wrong, you're
25:40
you're on GitHub, or GitLab, whatever, your source is available in every single jurisdiction, which is, you know, difficult to sort out. So it's actually quite a good idea to look at these, you know, these, not just the US database, I'd go for TM view, it's very easy to use, put the name in there. So what else comes up in our processes, the US view, and then that's essentially right. I
26:01
mean, from from Apache's point of view, that's as much effort as we can really put out. Yeah, given that that's where in the between Europe and the US, that's where the bulk of our current contributors are now, of course, that's quickly changing, especially in China. Right. But, but the Chinese trademark world is so different that it's kind of hard to, you know,
26:27
they're first to file and they're, you know, they have, it seems like an entire industry around trademark squatting. Yeah, absolutely. I wouldn't even go there. But yeah, I mean, it's all about risk management in a way. You just
26:41
said what you just said in the, you know, two, three basic steps to reduce the risk from from high to, to basically nearly zero, is what what I think projects need in both in both in both the actually choosing the name and what you say about having a policy to to help the community understand what they can do and what they can't do. Yeah, along with the policy is then, you know, make sure your governance council, your PMC, whoever, you know, review this at least
27:08
once a year, right? So you're just you're thinking about your the actual symbol of your public reputation, right? Your trademark your name, right? A lot of times people just don't think about it for a long time, and then something happens and they miss it.
27:21
Or, as you said earlier, the, you know, one of the biggest pieces of advice to anybody, anywhere around open source, if we could go back in time for a year, at any point in time saying, when you're starting a new thing, whether it's commercial or not, think about the difference between the product name and your company name, right? You might want to open
27:42
source it later. You can't have them be the same. I mean, you can, but you won't get any respect in the community. Right? Yeah, well, in the Hadoop, you know, Cloudera had this big debate, you know, because they were, you know, one of the big commercial names, you know, on Hadoop, wasn't it? I mean, that's kind of a practical example of this distinction between the commercial service and-
28:01
And don't forget Hortonworks, the other half of that. Yeah, the other one, exactly. The other ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just to find a point, what happened between Mozilla and Iceweasel? Can you give a story there? What happened with in Debian and I think it was Debian? Yeah, essentially Debian has the, what's the actual name? It's ethical guidelines. So they, of course, want to be open source,
28:25
but they also have a few other conditions and how they think about things. I'm drawing a blank on their specific name. The Debian free something guidelines. I'm trying to remember as well, because this has been a while since then. Yes. So essentially, they wanted to, I think it was really about like some of the logos where they
28:41
wanted to enforce those. And they came up with their version of Mozilla on Debian and Mozilla's like, no, you know, you have to do our logo and these things consistently and Debian's like, okay, we'll just call it Iceweasel. Which is about freedom to modify. Yeah. I mean, the problem is, is this debate about freedom
29:03
to modify. Can you modify it to such a extent that you're taking the name off it? And that's the, you know, the key thing. So that one of the trick questions I have earlier, I have the spot the lawyers little game where I play where I'd see who's a lawyer because they Twitch is, you know, and of course, we have all these open source licenses and they grant you trademark rights to write.
29:26
Not one of them. No, some specifically say no, you know, you may not use the name of this project in any distribution of this product. Yeah, that will be as the BSD for close. So I mean, you know, I'm kind of disappointed actually, that that other open source licenses, especially some of the modern ones
29:41
haven't added out. I mean, Apache has had that for for a long time, in terms of, I think it's section six of our license where we explicitly say this does not grant any trademark rights. Because, of course, lawyers understand copyright rights and trademark rights are completely separate, but a lot of people don't get that to start with.
30:00
But that also brings up my other sort of touch phrase favorite quote is, if you think about it, if you think about it in an organization running your open source project, right, it's not it's not just the people right there's organization might be legal one like Apache or Linux Foundation, it might just be, you know, people agreeing to work together. But if you think about the most important asset like actual legal asset. It's your trademark. And that's it.
30:26
Because everything else is is under your open source copyright license, right. The only thing that you can control is use of the name, everything else we have the right to fork right that's the point of open Yeah, absolutely.
30:40
So, just reminding people that that's that's it's really important to have thought about this a little bit. And, you know, there are resources out there but we still are sort of, you know, as popularly found or talked about, I think, especially in some of our, you know, up and coming medium sized open source projects that, you know, hit the same things we found before and, you know, have the same painful lessons.
31:06
Okay, well, I think time is up because I'm simply getting some pings here. Is that right? It's been great talking and working with and I think maybe we can collaborate to get some of these resources into the into the more visible. I think it'd be great to help out projects and do that.
31:26
Yeah, I have a resources page in my slides and I will go over to the breakout room and post a couple of links. And I'm happy to hang out for other questions. Sometimes people don't want to ask a question up in public because, you know, there are there are a couple of trademark stories that I can't really talk about in public because they were ugly, but they worked out so that's good.