Re: draft-ietf-ipr-trademarks-00.txt

[Simon Josefsson <jas at extundo.com>]

"Lawrence Rosen" <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> writes:

> Anyone can identify their trademarks in any document they want. Only if the
> trademark is used in association with specific goods to identify the source
> or origin of those goods does that word, symbol (etc.) serve as a trademark.
> For example, I can say that "Windows is a trademark of Microsoft" but that
> doesn't mean that I need Microsoft's approval or anyone else's to say that
> in this email nor that I need to remove that statement here because they
> might not like an open source lawyer talking about Windows. Jello brand
> gelatin is delicious and I encourage every IETF contributor to eat it. Just
> because I said that doesn't mean I'm marketing this email as Jello and I
> don't need the Jello Company's permission to make that statement. I can
> acknowledge their trademark or not in IETF specifications.

Thanks, I think your explanation is consistent with my view of how
trademarks can be used.

> IETF does not distribute goods or services. You don't need to worry about
> third party trademarks. Let those notices stay in the documents as
> submitted. Who will care?

Adding trademark identifiers, or possibly acknowledgments, send a
signal that this is required.  If it is not required, it is better to
avoid them in RFCs, in my opinion.  Nobody would care, and it means
less work for everyone.

If an IETF document included (tm) and (r), or acknowledgments, people
will use that as an argument to add similar language in other places.
Related arguments have already been used in this thread, e.g., that
trademark owners must protect their own trademarks by adding
identifiers.

Please, let's not proliferate these non-required identifiers and
statements.

Thanks,
Simon

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