Open source does not mean 'open to pilfer trademarks,' suggests Google

Some are apparently up in arms that Google is refusing to allow Chrome developers to use its trademarks and the comic book it released to help explain Chrome. To these and others that equate open source with "up for grabs," please pay attention:

Open source is governed by US intellectual property law. It is not above the law.

For those who mistakenly feel that open source is a stick-in-the-eye to "The (IP) Man," you're wrong. Open-source licensing depends upon and indeed presupposes copyright and trademark law. Without copyright there is no copyleft.

Clint Boulton, whose blog I enjoy and read daily, suggests:

I would be very careful if I were Google not to be too stringent with the trademark. If people are trying to pass themselves off as Google property that's one thing, but let's not send letters to every person using a Chrome logo.

To which I'd reply, "I would be very careful if I were Google to be as stringent as required by law to ensure I didn't lose the rights to my trademarks." Google needs to protect its trademarks or it risks losing them.

Surely it's not too much to ask people to respect Google's IP so that it can release more of it as open source?

[Sortova]

I have managed OpenNMS for many years now with minimal legal involvement. But the first lawyer I hired was to deal with a trademark infringement from a company in California that was producing "OpenNMS for Mac".

Now Ben Reed, one of our admins is also the admin for the Fink Project which ports a large amount of open source to Darwin. So we've supported OpenNMS on the Mac for years. However, this company was taking the OpenNMS code, modifying it, labeling it in a rather random fashion and distributing it as "OpenNMS".

I pointed out that he couldn't do that, that OpenNMS® is a registered trademark and that since we don't sell software the quality of that brand is on what we base our business. His changes were actually detrimental to the performance of the product and the last thing I wanted was MacWorld to use his version and say "OpenNMS sucks".

I explained that he was free to use the code under the GPL and could make changes to his heart's content as long as he didn't trade under our brand. I even pointed him to the Mozilla site which has a very lengthy explanation for why they limit what can be called "Mozilla". I pointed him to CentOS which removes all trademarked references to Red Hat.

He wouldn't change, so there went money that could have been spent on the project on a lawyer.

For Free and Open Source software, reputation is a major component of the value of the application, and one shouldn't complain about people trying to protect that value.

[smilin:)]

Google lecturing people on IP?

I've now seen it all.

[dragonbite]

The first thing I thought of was how Red Hat allow the use of their code, but not their trademark which makes complete sense.

The internet requires companies to hold onto their brands tighter than before, between brand recognition and reputation.

[ChromePlugins]

Matt, i'm the owner of the site in question, http://www.chromeplugins.org

If Google want to defend their mark and not allow sites to use the Chrome images then that's fine by me, however sending a single DMCA to me while turning a blind eye to thousands of high profile sites using the same images as me every day is clearly not defending the mark.

cnet is using the same images as i was forced to take down: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10046395-92.html

So before you point the "pilfering" finger at people, check your own backyard first.

[trimeta]

To be fair, there's a difference between using Google's logo in a fashion which makes it clear "we do not own this logo, it is the property of another organization, we are merely using it to tell you something about that organization" and using it to say "we are part of the group which this logo stands for." I don't know if you were using the Chrome logo in the second fashion, but if you were, Google was right to ask you to take it down.