Verily I say unto thee, that Roy Schestowitz spake thusly:
> ____/ Stephen Fairchild on Sunday 17 May 2009 20:24 : \____
>
>> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>>> HMR group possibly stealing the Ubuntu Logo
>> But theirs is off at a 'jaunty' angle. Kind of like when Hitler
>> stole the swastika.
>
> That Ubuntu logo is a universal symbol. Sometimes there are more than
> 3 people in it. All art is somewhat inspired by a combination of
> inputs anyway.
A similar thing happened with the Fedora logo and a company called
DataPortability:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/21/logo-war-red-hat-takes-on-dataportability/
http://wiki.dataportability.org/display/dpmain/DataPortability+Logo+Competition
Personally I find the whole concept of trademarks, or any other form of
Intellectual Monopoly, profoundly unethical. Yes, companies need to
distinguish themselves in order to be correctly identified, but then one
might easily say the same thing of /people/ ... should /you/ have to
change your name just because someone else is also called "Roy"? This is
why you have a surname, and an address, and a National Insurance (Social
Security) number, and a PAYE (tax) reference, and a passport number, and
a drivers license number. People (and companies ... and even their
products) are identified by more than just a name or a logo.
OTOH there is the problem of deliberate impersonation, where a person or
company assumes another's identity wholesale, and trades (or otherwise
acts) as an imposter, usually for criminal purposes. But I think it's
pretty clear, in the above two cases, that neither HMR Group nor
DataPortability are GNU/Linux distributors, and do/did not have
malicious intent. Actions viewed in isolation are not necessarily
indicative of wrongdoing. Motive is, as ever, the key distinguishing factor.
If a person or company shares a single, insignificant, identifying
feature with another, then I'd doubt that was more than a harmless
coincidence, especially when that person's or company's activities are
entirely unrelated to their namesake's. Once they cross the line into
the area of deliberate, wholesale impersonation, then by all means call
out the army of lawyers. However, the motive should not be to "protect"
"IP", but to prevent mis-attribution and misdirection. It's a subtle but
important distinction, which recognises the need to protect potential
victims against crimes of exploitation, whilst still renouncing the
so-called "right" to "own" this fictitious and ethereal substance called
"IP".
Of course, the perverted "IP" laws of our modern society dictate that
companies /must/ proactively "protect" this fictitious substance. Indeed
it is these corrupt laws which created this fictitious substance in the
first place, at the behest of the corporate gangsters who "lobbied" for
it with political and financial pressure (a.k.a. blackmail and bribery).
But despite this corruption of our society, it is my contention, and
always shall be, that these ethereal things described as "IP" are *not*
"property", and should never have been deemed as such. Impersonation is
immoral (and often /illegal/) exploitation, but not /theft/, since
neither a name nor a logo (nor any other form of identifier) can
possibly be unequivocally proved to be anyone's original work, and thus
their exclusive property, much like any other form of so-called "IP". To
have such "proof" would require access to the unabridged knowledge of
all mankind since the dawn of human history, not just an unresearched
registration document in some bureaucrat's office, secured with a big
wad of cash. /That's/ the /real/ crime: those who kidnap elements of
society's culture and mankind's combined knowledge, then claim exclusive
"rights" to it. *Intellectual Monopoly* is theft, not those who try to
liberate it from its captors.
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| "The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which
| the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf
| denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty.
| Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of
| the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today
| among human creatures." ~ Abraham Lincoln
`----
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.25.11-60.fc8
16:11:33 up 5 days, 18:32, 4 users, load average: 0.24, 0.08, 0.02
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