Comment by mindcrime
2 years ago
It's interesting: generally speaking OSS licenses concern copyright for the code, but not trademarks for the name of the project. Licensing Project Foobar under an OSS license should not really be seen as granting permission to use the name "Project Foobar".
But I just realized that the MIT license is worded in such a way that one could draw that inference, and it might stand up in court.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
One could probably make a compelling argument that "you have the right to deal in this Software without restriction" and "you have the right to sell this software" as including the right to sell it under the same name.
If one is going to use the MIT license (or anything else that doesn't call out the copyright/trademark distinction) it would probably be good to include a supplemental notice that reads something like "The MIT license here does not confer any rights to use the name 'Project Foobar'. You must distribute any copies or derivative works under a different name or we will sue you into oblivion for trademark infringement" (or something roughly along those lines).
I do not think so. First of all, the license is clear that it is a “copyright license”. In my view, that calls out the distinction from trademark by exclusion. It would not be a reasonable interpretation to assume a trademark license unless trademark is explicitly mentioned and even less so when the license is explicitly described as a “copyright” license. The license defines “The Software” and, again, I see no reason to infer trademark as being part of that definition.
The license also requires you to include attribution and to declare the copyright of the licensor. So, while you have access to the software, ownership has clearly not transferred. You have a copyright license ( that has to be declared ). Nothing more.
> I do not think so. First of all, the license is clear that it is a “copyright license”
No it doesn't. That's why you can use an MIT-licensed codebase that doesn't have an explicit patent grant and not worry about patent enforcement—it doesn't narrowly constrain itself to copyright.
Or use Fooweasel in the source code and Foobar™ in the binaries.