gnome-mastermind trademark question

[Filippo Argiolas]

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 12:41 PM, Hans de Goede <hdegoede at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
Hi Hans, Hi All,

> Actually taking a quick look it is a 100% clone of mastermind, which is ok,
> game rules are not copyrighted.
> However using the name is not ok, as that is trademarked and thus protected,
> take a look at the whole trademark case (as in they were sued) around
> Scrabulous, a popular Scrabble clone which was integrated into facebook.
> There bug mistake? Using a name too close to Scrabble. Since getting sued is
> something we (Fedora) try to avoid, gnome-mastermind is not acceptable for
> Fedora under its current name.
>
> And Filippo, unless you are looking to getting yourself sued, I seriously
> advice you to change the name of your game.

I'm sorry for the late reply but I had problems registering to the mailing-list
I faced this trademark issue multiple times since the game is out.
I looked for a new *good* name for quite some time but then gave up
because I didn't find any. I'm still open to suggestions so feel free
to give yours!
Anyway, the usual practice of trademark holders is to send
cease-and-desist letters before to take further legal actions, they
never sent one and I'm ready to change the name if they'll do (or
before if I find a good name).
I'm going to post a little "new name poll" on planet gnome hopefully
soon, now I can't because I have some problem with my web service
provider (they erased my wordpress database... :-/).

As I said on irc I don't really like the name gnome-mindmaster
because, apart being ugly, it's too similar to the original name and I
don't really think it will preserve me from legal actions. I'm more
oriented versus some name involving the Bulls and Cows original game,
something like gnome-bulls-and-cows (a bit long, though...), I like
gnome-moo but isn't it too debian-ish? Other suggestions (maybe
variations on the bulls and cows theme..)?
Anyway I don't really think it's up to package maintainers to take a
choice about the new name, I'm quite open towards a name change so why
don't do it upstream?

About the Scraboulous thing, I think, really, that it's an absolutely
different one.
They were using the name for profit purposes and making quite a lot
money out of it.
They were actual competitors of the trademark holder. Furthermore
Hasbro tried to acquire them before to proceed on legal ways.
I am just a little developer with a little freesoftware project that I
created as a *tribute* to the board game. I never intended to be a
competitor and I acknowledge their rights both on the game and on the
mark both in the website and in the about dialog. Needless to say I
don't make any money out of it. I don't really think they will be
interested to sue me.
And, there have been tons of mastermind clones abusing of the
trademark, just do a quick google search, and I don't really think
Hasbro, Invicta, Pressman toys or one of the other holders ever sued
them.

About the distributors question (I'm sorry if I reply here for all the
questions), how could be the distributors involved if the trademark
holder would decide to sue me?
Why all the distributors except fedora care about this thing? The
game, as far as I know, is included in Debian (and they usually have
strict requirements about intellectual property issues), Ubuntu,
Foresight, Archlinux, Gentoo, Slackware, Netbsd, and probably others.
It is hosted on GNOME svn too.
Allow me to find it at least a bit strange that only Fedora ever complained.

I think that's all, I hope I didn't seem rude or upset, english is not
my language so please forgive me if I did, I'm really open to a name
change and to good suggestions!
Thank you all for considering my issue,

Best Regards

Filippo Argiolas