gnome-mastermind trademark question
Hans de Goede
hdegoede at redhat.com
Mon Dec 1 03:41:13 PST 2008
Hi All,
Evgeni Golov wrote:
> Hey * (especially Hans),
>
> Filippo Argiolas (fargiolas at gnome.org) joined #freedesktop-games,
> asking if we could do something about the inclusion of his game
> gnome-mastermind[1] in Fedora.
>
> He stated that the game is not included because of Fedora worrying
> about the trademark of the original mastermind game, but eg Debian
> didn't.
> IANAL, but I don't see a real issue here, gnome-mastermind !=
> mastermind
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.
Regards,
Hans
p.s.
Games and trademarks is an interesting topic to discuss on the new games-list
in general, I've noticed that other distro's (Debian for example) do not seem
to care much about this, even though it can be a real issue see the Scrabulous
example. In Fedora however, we always rename games which are clones, when they
have names to close to the original name, where possible working together with
upstream. Some examples:
lbreakout2 -> lbrickbuster2
armagetron-ad -> armacycles-ad
gnometris -> gnome-falling-blocks
xgalaga -> xgalaxy
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