 Yes, I am, matter of fact. So, thank you for coming. It's a little less crowded than earlier. We are missing our leader who wants to come, but he'll probably drop by. So, this is the second trademark related buff today, basically about what the trademark team does, what it maybe does not do at the moment, and what it should do and just what the outgoing strategy for Davion as an entity should be with regards to granting trademark requests and also potentially pursuing people who may be using our trademark in a way which we do not appreciate. So, same as last round, does anyone want to start or should Brian and me just give a quick intro? Could you summarize the conclusions from this morning both? Yeah, sure. Basically, the rough consensus I'd say is there need to be... Well, we all agree that there is official Davion, and we can all agree that official Davion is, I take the official images, I install it on a machine, I do not enable backports, I do not enable contract, non-free, whatever, and when I install this, this is a system which has been, which is officially Davion. Anything else if I enable contract, if I have backports, if I whatever, it's not official Davion anymore. We also all agree that there is Ubuntu and Mint and what have you, which are on the far side and which are derived from Davion, but which are not Davion anymore. In between there's this field which we were talking about, and it seems that the rough consensus is leaning in the direction of enabling other entities to use the Davion name in some form or other, ideally supported by a test suit of some kind, which can be run on a machine to see if it behaves as a normal Davion should, together with a rule set of what you need to do to actually be able to call yourself Davion. For example, if you wanted source fiber, even if you go through all the tests, you are not allowed to call yourself Davion anymore, obvious. We also made a fourth category, which would basically be, because this test suit and everything, the assumption is people want to be as close to official Davion as possible, but they cannot do really official Davion, but they want to. This is in the included and they are trying really hard category, and there's also people who may toss them in on a laptop installed sky, installed non-feed drivers for obvious reasons, and this is somewhere in between the I'm trying really, really hard and the I'm just you want to, I don't really care about you, if I may I may. So that's the rough summary I would say. The second and maybe in one or both of the middle categories is some degree of oversight from the project or some relationship with the project is probably wise as well. Yes. Yeah, I applied it with the test suit, but yeah, you're right. Yes, sure. So that's the rough idea. So should the two of us be really short in some way? You want or should I? Should I correct you that you are currently not a deli suit? I'm a deli suit. Why don't you drop it on the website because... Okay, that's not a problem. I can do that. So the other conversation that Neil and I had earlier was that... Didn't speak up a little bit because this... Sure. The other conversation that Neil and I had earlier was that... Can you just move up all of you because... Oh, yeah. You were just trying to... Just... So we were talking about one of the drivers for this conversation is that we want the value that the community is giving to this platform to be acknowledged as a contribution from the community, right? So we want to indicate where the source of value is coming from. And this is important since there's work to be done. There's going to be effort to implement this program or to find the program or to enforce the program or if we need additional marks, we're going to have to work on that. So anytime there's effort, there should also be a corresponding value and the value is that the market will become aware, more aware of the contribution of the community in the Debian form, right? As opposed to somebody else's form, like a bunty. So just an important point, right? And we're not just doing this for random reason. We're doing it because we want to accrue value to the mark of Debian. Yes. Another arbitrary thing that people name things. Yeah, that's definitely one of the reasons. I mean, we also just want to protect users because if you have to call everything... Or if you are to lose with the trademark at some point... There's no assurance of quality. And you'll lose the market. Should we do this short somewhere or do we just... Does everybody know what we do with trademark things? Actually just a technical note to decal is no longer number of trademark things because there's been direct... This is on? This is on? My laptop is still powered. I heard a fan go off. Yeah, yeah. Okay, just leave it. Can you keep taking notes? Yeah, it doesn't matter. I was saying to DPL is no longer a member of the trademark thing. It's like every old delegation text looks like it has been updated. Organization page. Organization page? Yeah, just make it a real fixer. Yeah, that's not a fixer. Yeah, because that is what it is called. Yeah, so is it show of hands? Who thinks they are aware of what the trademark team does? Okay, so we should probably... Yeah, sure. Basically, largely, in my opinion, or responsibly is to field incoming emails to trademark. What that means is largely we have a published trademark policy, which you can find on our website, where there's a lot of uses that are permitted, particularly in regards to merchandising, like branding, like t-shirts, cups, hats, these kind of things where you don't need to ask permission, but there are certain cases where you do need to ask permission and that email address is really less permission. And any questions about using the WNHR work are sent to that. A lot of the email requests we get are, can we put it on the hat and we put them in the trademark policy and said you're allowed to do that, you can need to ask, but thank you for asking and such and such. We're also responsible for advising the GPL on trademark policy and the project on GPL policy, but that is not a conversation we can make on our own. So it kind of brings some of the legal aspects of trademark to the conversation. Also, we do interface with lawyers to register for some of the dead-end trademarks. Which we should extend? Yes. We also, we have the dead-end trademark. We are working on the bad-comp trademark. We also work on fixing our registration to the dead-end trademark because you choose some group-practicing method. We actually trademarked dead-end. And it swirled with dead-end written below it instead of just a swirled. This was, yeah, basically just, yeah, a mix-up. But we also need to fix that. Also, in theory, we would be able to pursue anyone who is not actually according to our published policies. But that hasn't happened yet, mainly due to many of our reasons, both within the team and within the lawyer team. So unless we really take money in turn on the hands and put it on the table for someone to take, yeah. So before the current two of you were active and doing trademark stuff, there were at least certain cases where there was no lawsuits filed. But there were cases where, for example, somebody unfriendly had the Debbie.es domain name. And there was, maybe even Debbie.ee, or I might be confusing them, but, eee-ee, yeah. And I think they were even redirecting it to, of all things, a Microsoft hosting site, maybe they included Debian and Microsoft. Something totally not appropriate for Debian.ee. And I believe we did have lawyers help deal with them and make clear that we would be willing to pursue the dispute resolution process. I mean, that did not actually have to happen, I believe. But once they realized we were serious, I think we ended up having, I think we ended up having, they negotiated some small payment from us to them, but it was like a token amount, and we got it back. So a bit of that has happened, but it's never been to the legal lawsuit yet. Yeah, but the point was that, I think, before, I know it happened, but that was before... Before the court set up, yes. So you definitely should register Debian by itself, too, without the score on it? As a word it already is. So we do have Debbie in the word, Mark, registered, in the U.S., and some of the Madrid protocol countries. Just the word Debbie. But official logo is not the swirl, right? That's what we registered, because we agreed with the detail that that was what we most cared about. But it's only registered with the word Debian. Right, it's not registered with the word Debian. We have the word Debian, and we have the swirl with Debian written in the word. So you don't need to file another application for the swirl. But the swirl was found to come in, right? No. It was used from... No, no, no, no. But whenever everybody comes in and, like, oh, I saw a swirl on, like, ketchup, or... This swirl was not contested. We just had a request to write Debian under it for clarification. And we thought it was just for basically naming the specimen. But... It became part of the specimen. Yeah. They drew it. They put Debian... They typed Debian on the bottom of the drawing. I'm a trademark lawyer. And I used to work at the trademark office. So I've been a trademark lawyer for about 25 years. Unfortunately, on the drawing of the mark that was submitted, they typed the word Debian, thinking it was for clarity purposes. But as soon as you put anything else on the drawing page of the mark, that becomes part of your mark. So it's very simple. For $300, we can just file another one for the swirl. The swirls are registrable under the U.S. trademark app. And as long as they're no confusing and similar marks, it should be able to get a registration. And I did look at every swirl in the U.S. trademark page. So you're a swirl master? Yeah. I certainly don't know of any other swirl being used in this class. Right. I've explored these. Would my swirl be strange? Is that infringing swirl? We probably allowed that. That's just wrong. I don't know. Probably. The reason the problem with registration is more one of manpower on a several seaside. Yeah. Because we do get consulted for free, but it's a limited amount of time. They just basically, when they're busy, they're busy, which is understandable, but it doesn't really speed up the overall process. I'm just saying, I can go back to my room and file the trademark application now. Deal. Okay. I mean, right. I mean, I can do that. Okay. I'm perfectly willing to file a trademark application at any time that you guys want me to. For nothing. And I just wanted to point out, so this is one of the reasons why you want to do this, right? So devian-hosting.info, right? Not a devian property, right? Not affiliated with the community anymore of an indication that they use the product, right? Right. They have your logo. And the name. Your swirl. Your typeset, right? And the wordmark is also in their domain name and branding. So we can already do that. We can already do with them. But the question is, are we losing with that? Yeah. Well, so. Absolutely. Very much. Yes. Because if you don't enforce it. All right. Well, basically, in order to maintain ownership of the trademark, you have to control the nature and quality of the goods provided under that trademark. Exactly. If you allow third parties to use the mark without you controlling the use through a license, then it essentially becomes public domain. So if you allow others to use in an unfettered manner, then you lose your right to challenge the people you don't like. Even if you let people you do like use it in an unfettered manner, you're still, you're letting it go. It becomes, it no longer indicates this is a product of Debian. But as far as I understood, we just became aware of that. So the process starts now for us to be unfettered. Right. So now it's like start raining again so that. Well, in this case, even aside from the legal requirements, which is certainly good to consider, if you have a site called Debian hosting as the main second level label in its domain name, you might actually assume that it's run by the Debian project in some way. And if there's any problem with it whatsoever or any shadiness or bad support, it might make users think that we're doing a bad job and something, even though we have no connection. And usually when you have a registration for a wordmark like Debian and someone puts it into a domain name, then you have a course of action to go after that. Oh, yeah. We could totally, we don't even have to go to the court system because I can. Right. Yeah. Exactly. Or ideally talk to them first. Yeah. Talking first is probably, yeah. Of course, yeah. But the fact that we were able to go to, for that EU is a different system, but we were able to do the European equivalent of that dispute process, gave us extra leverage and we were willing to if we needed to. But once again, going back to original blog in the morning, right, what may itself call Debian? Yeah. I would consider having such a website a good thing for Debian because it increases visibility as long as we agreed there might be some kind of mutual agreement that they would be able to use. Yeah. So if it was called Bob's Debian hosting or like Sorenson Debian, if it was providing a Debian hosting service and did not have quite so generic a name and reached an agreement with us, I don't see a problem with having Debian in the name if they're actually serving Debian and we have some oversight to some degree. They're meeting all your requirements. Right. But if it's just saying Debian hosting, you would probably assume that it's connected to the Debian project as a provider. I am assuming whenever it's Debian.org or Debian.net base, that's when I am assuming it's connected to Debian. You know more than most people do. Yeah. You know more than most people. So they need to have a test of the average person. And if they are doing things that are in the project's interest. You know a lot more than I was looking at. Right. And the test would be the general consumer. Yeah. The super savvy. So if they are doing things that are in the project's interest then they should be very willing to take a license to the trademark. Yeah. In that way you're not losing the ability to enforce the trademark. You're not potentially losing the mark as an indication of source. You know you can have that conversation with them. But this for example isn't unlicensed use of the trademark. It's hard to see you would want to license one particular site to be Debian processing as opposed to Debian, as you say, Bob's and Tolton's. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Because it does give at some point. Unless they decided that they wanted to work within the Debian project to create a hosting service that's under the status of the DPL somehow and you know govern through Debian processes that would be a different case. Then you're not into license as well. Then it's a different type of agreement. Yes. You have to consider your trademark just as important as do you think Microsoft or Amazon or anybody else would be like, oh, someone else can use my name. I guarantee there is not a Microsoft-hosting. Right. They would be probably like a little bit. We don't want to be like... Right. But you want to be able to say, do this, this, this. They want to be that this is a use which shouldn't have happened. Yes. Right. Unless we permit it. I don't think we would permit it. We would not. The current policy demands that they require, they ask us and we give them permission. They're using Debian in a top level domain. They're using our, you know... That's it. They're basically doing things that implies an endorsement from Debian which is against the trademark policy. And I think in this case we would probably say no unless we name it somehow. Like maybe pre-fetch ourselves. At least they list on the website Debian and the Debian level our trademarks of software and public interest. Who do they know about us? So they know they're in front of us. As you can see, as you know. I mean you could also require that certain parties that, you know, put in that, you know, certain level of font and prominence saying who owns these trademarks. There is a way to host Debian that we won't get mad at. You know, you can't be the Debian hosting place. You could be a Debian hosting place. Yeah. I would actually think that was the official Debian. Yeah. I suspect that they have the swirl there. They have the, well this is the official Debian hosting page. And I wouldn't even assume .info is unofficial because it's making how many consulates and embassies and things of foreign countries have weird .info.diz. I've seen this. It's bizarre. The mark is owned by somebody else. Or like there could be a Debian soda. Yeah. Or Debian cupcakes. And they have the mark first. So then you get mad. Oh. I would just make one additional point. Here. Right here. With the licensing. Licensing does imply that you have quality control. And it doesn't have to be like extreme quality control. There may, you may want to consider further down the line that, you know, there's a once a year check-in or some sort of like you have to send us a sample or check in with us and, you know, check these boxes once a year just to say that you're doing like an annual quality control. Quality in what context? First if I'm selling a hosting service, that this would be different quality control from selling baseball caps. Well then it would, I mean it depends on the service. You know, appropriate for the service. So it's an irrelevant measurement of quality for each type of license. Right. Licensing. Right. It would have to be. But is it sufficient for us to monitor how they are using, what they are doing in respect of the use of the Debian name and product? Or would we, in this case, would we need to monitor, if we wanted to allow this, would we need to monitor how the quality of the final hosting service to customers is? Where is the? I think you would have to, I mean you could do a loose monitoring of what, like the end result is. So you're saying, you're saying it's up to us what the nature of it is as long as we're satisfied that they're adhering to our idea of what the brand should mean. Right. Yeah. Yes, but then I think there should be some like, either annual or some check-back period so that, because the other thing is that you're applying your mark to these goods, then if some, I mean for a hosting service, if something happens and someone wants to, is really dissatisfied and wants to sue, they're going to be, okay, this is a Debian trademark good, I'm pursuing Debian. So if you let somebody sell Debian soda and they get poisoned. Which is the other reason it should be a generic name, if we ever were allowed to do this, like someone sows Debian, that they'll sue, someone sows more than Debian. Right. Although a lot of trademark users, a lot of the trademarks don't do this, like I think, I don't think, let's say for example that you're doing the, let's say you're doing something related to Android and you follow Google's Android policy for displaying the robot on your website or something. I don't think there is any periodic, having a human look at you in any regard. I mean, they probably like, I mean, I'm sure they have the right to change their terms and I'm sure they have the right to change the terms and I'm sure they have the right to go after you if you stop complying with it, but I don't think they have the requirement that there is a periodic conversation. And a lot of other providers don't either. I would think that they should, but it wouldn't scale. Maybe you can answer the question though, when would it be allowed in this context as descriptive use, if they had a hosting service and they just say, we are using Debian, and therefore we're going to say that. I was talking about using the robot in that example. Yeah, but I mean, say they want to use the Debian logo and have it advertised, they are using Debian and put on the front page, not as their name, but on the front page. It's also copyrighted by the way. Yeah, but that's why I'm not a lawyer. Oh, we gave a pretty comprehensive license for the copyrights though. Yeah, and like civil may also be, I'm wondering if it's like certification or something. Trademark, I'm pretty sure. But I mean, would it be allowable for them legally to they need permission if they just want to put it up and say, we are using Debian, and have a happy picture of the Debian slides? Sort of like me, it's probably because it's live. Well, I think for the copyrights side, I think we ended up doing a pretty premise of that, like the style license, for the trademark side. If it's a truthful statement for using Debian, yes, you could do that. As long as it wasn't an indication of the brand, of the provider, of the services. Right, as far as it comes into the name. The TLD is a problem, right? And then the fact that they're using your logo type, when you're using your Swarov, in their logo is a problem. But if they wanted to say, and we host Debian, but we exclusively host Debian, that's totally different. Or if they have a listing of all the images that you can load up on their cloud, and they have a logo next to it. So since it is 232, I should ask Arthur Topes-Petit, this is what I'm actually talking about. I was using it as an example. It's good. I apologize if we... It's a good example. Do you want to mention that trademark you were working on? Sure. We're also going to be... We're in the process of working to file the trademark for get-on. And not covering the software class so that it could not complete with configuration management software, but just a conference class? We actually considered filing for... There was like a selection list of areas where the mark would apply to. I think we left in software. So including the configuration management system. Yeah, just because it's basically for free... I guess. Do you use it on... Do you have examples of use on software? Yes. Every Debian system. And every Ubuntu system. There's a piece of software called that. Debian conference is also the Debian configuration management system. So you need to license to Debian. That means you get license from Debian. Well, depending on who owns the... In this context, we are delegated by Debian, but the end effect is that SPI holds the trademark. Right. There are historical reasons for that. Basically, Debian is associated in the U.S. and if you can get something trademark in the U.S., you're pretty much assured that in almost every country in the Madrid protocol, in the Madrid protocol, except I don't think Debian has a location as a group by itself. Well, we at your county only have the logo protected by the Madrid protocol, but that's about countries not being out of the Madrid protocol. And you have to file separately in this country. The honest answer is you don't really care. No, that's the honest answer. We don't have the mentor or the specialized lawyers in those countries. Sometimes you have to have... We try to pursue this at work for a trademark. For some countries, you even have to have a local company to register. And then this company needs to be a majority owned by someone local to the country and not someone foreign. So this is just not worth it. According to Debian's trademark webpage, via the Madrid protocol, it's protected in all of the EU and China and Japan. And separately, it's also been registered in Brazil. So it was extended to all those countries? Yeah, extended via the Madrid protocol to all those except for Brazil which is separately registered. I think the URL and the international registration number on what we do. And it's... China, EU, Great Britain and Japan. I believe you. Not protocol-wise. Oh, really? Okay. It's not listed, but I believe you. And I just take a look at Canada's webpage. It would be easy to send it there if we cared. What about in direction countries like India? I just want to mention in many jurisdictions where we may not have a formal filing, we are also under common law where... We're using... Yeah. In some countries, sometimes some countries are first to file in Asian countries. Well, we have the two biggest... Right. Well, two of the three, two of the four biggest economies in Asia already covered. Right, yes, yeah. China is a... India and Korea are the others ahead of mine. Right. So, I mean, if you know Lawyers return for free in India or in Korea, we can... SFLC has some small presence there, but they're also busy. I can chat with their Indian associates. But they still like to work for free. Someone that... But, like, SFLC does have a presence there. Okay. Like, Mishi is licensed in India, I think. SFLC.IN Yeah. So, what do we do? You don't have to read, sorry. Does anyone have some comments on if we should do more or different things? Are you happy or are we so invisible that you're even sure if you're happy? So, just as a point of clarification, I'm sorry, let me step over here. Just a point of clarification, we should probably... So, we have a registered trademark. We have a registered trademark that is a visual mark. But that's open only in the U.S. We haven't paid to extend it into Madrid because there's, like, a little glitch in the back. Understood. And we didn't want to proceed with that. Probably neither one of those marks or the third mark that you're talking about in Datacom is really suitable to the program that we were talking about this morning. Right? I think some people would say that that word mark is suitable to it. But basically, from the customer perspective, what you want to have is you want to look onto Google Amazon, what have you, doesn't matter, and you want to select your minutes of choice because that's what you know and that's what you want. And as a normal user, what I would go for is the word Damian and the server. If I see that anywhere, that's what I would solve without pretty much thinking. I'll check if I can install testing, so I totally understand where you're coming from. My conversation earlier was we may need to create another mark that is, like, a powered by or approved by Damian or something like that. That could be good. Should this be a trace mark? Yeah, I was trying to think of something, well, I was trying to work it through like whether you wanted to have some sort of certification mark like the Good House keeping seal of approval. I used by owner, so you might have to come up with an offshoot mark and I don't know how far you'd have. If you could have Damian compliance or I was kidding with Brian saying the Damian swirl of approval or some, you know, Damian little logo thing, they could say, you know, that you approve of it. So as an example of that outside the cloud case, I was having a sort of variant of these two talks with someone downstairs before this we were talking about the case of hardware with Damian pre-installed and so in that space we could have, if people wanted to define the terms, we could have a certified Damian hardware mark because we don't produce hardware and we don't label anything as that and similarly, if there was some... if we wanted to have a mark that might apply to Damian cloud images that are not made by Damian as opposed to the ones that are made by Damian, you know, like Damian compatible or Damian or, you know, you know... Damian primary? There could be a variant, right? But I don't think we need it if they're trying to from your first... if they're trying to get into the second tier from your fourth year version this morning where they're trying to say as close as possible to Damian and they're talking with us and testing and complying and collaborating, I think Damian is fine for that. If we wanted to have a mark where they're trying for the base operating system to legitimately be Damian and not a derivative but they're adding on other stuff if we wanted to say like, you know, modified Damian as a mark or like, you know, Damian plus or that implies something different but, you know, Damian with add-ons or something that could be a mark. So, my... Just to come back to your internal question for this swirl of approval, would we need to file for a new trademark or would we just... Well, you could just have a common law trademark, I mean, common law certification mark. You'd have to call it a certification mark because you could not put the Debbie in the seal swirl of approval on something that you make. So, if you started making hardware it's just you can't approve your own goods if you're a certifier. Could we file a separate application? Could we define the rules for certification and allow a different company as a certifier to certify us as compliant with our own rules? Like, if we define the rules in a standard way, maybe we certify others but we also allow other entities to do the certification and they certify us. This would make more sense for hardware. For hardware totally and for like, vendor add-on like, Debian with add-ons. It could work for that kind of cloud image. It would only work for things that are made by not Debian. And the only other caveat, if you do a certification mark and you're wanting to make a new distro that's basically Debian with some differences, it could work for that. Yeah, and there could be a class of certification mark that if you jump through these hoops we will stamp you. The only caveat is that you don't have a certification mark. If you have 100 rules and somebody, even if somebody you don't like follows those 100 year rules then you have to certify them. Can you agree to divorce them? I think we agree to not call it a certification but wouldn't it be possible to just have a version number and then they're compliant with version one but we bring out version two in a year and then they're not compliant that's a possibility as well. If we make a spec and they say that they're complying with a spec and they're not, that's some problem about false advertising, right? Her point was that they comply to the spec but not in a way which we approve of because we forgot to say no spyware and put in spyware. Or maybe the certification could mean that even with a certification mark if it's a sort of thing where the certification needs to be recertified every year and the definition may change. And if we did that and then if we forgot to do that then if we add spyware to the definition and then within the next year so that would also work with the mark. Keep in mind though that as long as you so there's the work that you do to create the program and then there's the work that you do to enforce the program or applying labor to kind of fix this compliance problem. Which a spec wouldn't require but we'd also police it as well. Because all we could do if they were claiming to be compliant and we were just probably complying to the FTC or similar agencies, right? We couldn't do more than that but if they're misusing our mark we could take more direct action. Right, so if we want to be able to do more than how many do you think are out there that are, how many people do you think would either be licensing or certifying what kind of numbers are you envisioning? For derivative of product and derivative of software product probably no even less. Less than a thousand for the future but I suspect that when more and more companies start hosting they just pop up left and right expecting to to multiply. Yeah, probably thousands. Especially since when we have a program which allows people to use our name that does add value to their product so all of a sudden people also want to get onto this bandwagon to also have to certification No, not certification. Just for your information the official part is over. I'm just going to ask one question. Yeah, but I think if you guys want to wrap up you're free to but we'll probably discuss informally for a few more minutes. I do also free to take so