Ubuntu’s trademark folly fueled by confusion over law, EFF says
22 11 2013Canonical’s enforcement of the trademark for Ubuntu put egg on the company’s face last week when it went after a website critical of its approach to user privacy. A website called “Fix Ubuntu,” which provides instructions for disabling an Internet search mechanism in the Ubuntu operating system, received a letter asking it to change its domain name and stop using the Ubuntu logo.The website is run by Micah Lee, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the EFF quickly informed Canonical that “the First Amendment fully protects the use of trademarked terms and logos in non-commercial websites that criticize and comment upon corporations and products.”
Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth admitted on his blog that the letter to Lee was a mistake. But he also claimed that his company must enforce its trademarks or lose them:
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