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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