Letter from Raspberry Pi Foundation over trademark use
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The Raspberry Pi ecosystem is literally one of enabling creators, and when they went to mistakenly enforce their trademark, the community literally fell all over themselves to bite the hand that feeds them.
If you run a successful tech business, you can reasonability except hundreds of people to try to rip off your content, steal your API, demand access to your APIs, reappropriate your logos and designs, and outright steal and resell your content. The mobile app development market is notoriously subject to this trend.
I think it would be wise for those in this community to be aware that companies are daily trying to defend themselves against people that generally don't want to develop their own businesses, but ride on the coat-tails of others. The danger is a race to the bottom of dilution for the company brand and outright fraud for customers.
If Raspberry Pi or any other company does something like this, take a moment to maybe understand why they did it, and how something might have gone wrong before vilifying a company that literally contributes TONs of work to the creator community. There are many times when I wonder how participants here actually run or have built a company - this comment isn't to gatekeep, but to point out that it makes no sense for a creator community to act like this.
Quite a lot of us are, and have been for years, disagreeing with the concepts of trademark, patents, and legally enshrined IP.
This is nothing new. If anything the reason you see it increasing might be that over the years there have been more and more "outsiders" (not traditional US businessmen or entrepreneurs) in the startup scene than before.
Regardless of what you think of the above, as many others have pointed out, the particular way they played this (inaction for years, and then suddenly "do all of these huge changes within two weeks or we'll sue you out of business") is not easy to interpret charitably on them.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Either way, good on them for recognizing the mistake and making amends. Might not have happened without all the backlash.
> Trademark owners have a duty to police their mark. This applies to all types of marks – brand names, slogans, color, product shapes, or even a smell. The cost of dropping the ball on this duty can range from a bar on future enforcement of your rights against a particular company to a complete loss of all trademark rights. As a practical business reality, the value of marks that are not policed and their associated goodwill are always in danger.
[0] https://www.mintz.com/insights-center/viewpoints/2251/2013-0...
STATEMENT FROM PHILIP COLLIGAN ON RASPBERRY PI TRADEMARKS
Yesterday we sent a letter to a member of the Raspberry Pi community as part of our efforts to protect the Raspberry Pi trademark that was inconsistent with our values as a community organisation. We got it wrong and we have apologised to the valued community member who got the letter. We are undertaking a review of how we protect our trademark to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.
The letter was sent automatically to a small number of individuals responsible for social media accounts and websites that were identified by external legal advisers as possibly infringing our trademarks. It should never have been sent.
It is important that we take action to protect the Raspberry Pi trademarks, not least to protect the public from bad actors who deliberately misuse our brands to sell poor quality, rip off products.
We want to do that in a way that doesn’t undermine the use of the Raspberry Pi brands and trademarks by members of the fantastic Raspberry Pi community who share our educational mission and who do so much to bring it to life everyday.
If you have a question or concern about your use of the Raspberry Pi brand or trademarks, please get in touch with us at trademarks@raspberrypi.org.
Does that happen often, automatic legal notices?
while (1) {
company_does_something_stupid();
gets_caught();
apologize();
makes_promises();
if (bankrupt)
break;
}bankrupt = !is_promises_kept() || is_shitty_product();
translates to: not really our fault but...
> The letter was sent automatically
(...)
> that were identified by external legal advisers
The basic rule that you may not use 'Raspberry Pi' as part of your company name or in your domain name has been there since 1st April 2012 (and indeed potentially earlier, that was the earliest page in the wayback machine archive) though interestingly the 'raspberrypi-spy.co.uk' domain was registered a few days before 1st April 2012 on the 11th March 2012. I wonder if those trademark rules were visible at the time?
Doesn't really matter from a legal standpoint though in terms of how you view RPi's conduct here I think it'd be very different if the trademark rules page popped up yesterday vs available to read when the creator of raspberrypi-spy.co.uk started the website.
Though it's not a good look to happily leave them to it for so long before enforcing anything. I wonder if there was an initial informal approach that hasn't been tweeted about or if this letter was the first they heard of it?
Edit: Minor typo fixes and tweaks to text.
Trademarks are the exclusive right to use an identifying mark pertaining to a particular trade. (Which is why your grocery story has no issues advertising apples for sale in their produce department)
FWIW, the Raspberry Pi Foundation appears to have rights to this mark as it pertains to various types of publications. ('publications' is mentioned 5 times in the US trademark registration)
Reason why i am saying this is that i saw this article with the title
"Introducing the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ Single Board Computer"
https://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2018/03/introducing-raspbe...
They could have written "Review of" instead of "Introducing" .
At the end, I think that Raspberry Pi must also clarify properly the terms of usage of their assets in their website. For media usage,it is better to permit users to use some assets.
Imagine how different this letter would look like.
"Here is the community logo you can use and here is the license that allows you to use it. Only rule is: don't try to act like you are us. Thanks for increasing the value of the product by providing content."
Maybe RPi just hired some <profanity-word> lawyers that need to justify their salaries by doing same-old, before somebody in the top level wakes up and goes "maybe that's not the best way of doing things"?
This is not a valid moral defence.
You're welcome and you deserve it!
> Let's not imply that all decisions are malicous and all lawyers are evil.
I'm really not. But I can imagine that if you're a professional versed in blindly protecting IP - this is what you would do. The decision to do it in that specific way (suing infringement left and right) needs to come from the top and typically is not a decision that a lawyer would make alone. So, 3 scenarios:
1) this is an unsupervised default action of a lawyer that's just applying the law without guidance from management, because that's what they expect that they should be doing.
2) management approves of this and they're short-sighted thinking that the logo IP is more important than the community
3) management decided that they'll make a business move that requires stronger branding and purposefully want to kill the community to monopolize the support.
In case 1 and 2, we can hope that this will be corrected. I really don't like case 3, but again - I was never a very good business-person.
EDIT: Wow, so it was No.2. Glad to see the feedback loop working. But as pointed out by others on this thread - it's not that RPi should not protect themselves and their trademark - it's that they can do it in a better way than sending take-down orders.
> You cannot use Debian trademarks in a company or organization name or as the name of a product or service.
> You cannot use Debian trademarks in a domain name, with or without commercial intent.
https://zelda.gamepedia.com/Community:Nintendo_of_America_v....
https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2000/d200...
The site mentioned here is also very clear it's a fan site and not associated with the Raspberry Pi Foundation too...
I suppose they could’ve done it with a little less ‘ultimatum’, but it looks like they _did_ reach out before unleashing anything else.
I do hope Eben Upton weighs in on this, because whoever signed this off, it's a bad decision all round. Blaming trademark law is just a dishonest get-out-of-jail-free that big corporations use to justify belligerent bad-faith dealing. I hope the Raspberry Pi Foundation can show that it's different. This is not a good start.
They have also replied indicating something to this effect. https://twitter.com/Raspberry_Pi/status/1318494942478635009
"This letter was automatically sent to"
This is a letter from the foundation. I don't see any lawyers listed anywhere, and no indication that they have taken legal action.
Plenty of cases here in Germany as well that created quite some backlash. I still remember e.g. the case of "Held Der Steine", a fantastic guy who's the most popular Lego Youtuber in Germany, where Lego thought it would be a great idea to send him a "Cease and Desist" letter because part of his logo vaguely resembled a Lego brick. He wasn't amused and with his enormous reach (millions of people watch his videos) he made sure a lot of people learned about this greedy behavior of the Lego company.
You could make a reasonable case that someone may be confused and think this fan is officially related to the Raspberry Pi company.
How much of a Raspberry Pi blog is going to be unrelated to the "Raspberry Pi brand"?
This may not seem friendly to you, but the default is a heartless C&D with the letterhead of a legal firm and starting something like “our client…”
This is not legal advice; this is my personal view and in no way relates to my employment.
This take was so wrong the raspberry pi ceo came out and apologized.
As a non-lawyer brit, this sound horribly harsh, we're about to sic the lawyers on you unless you stop everything immediately.
The very name Raspberry Pi Spy seems fairly clear - it is either using the raspberry pi to do something (spy) or it is spying on the raspberry pi. Either way, it screams unofficial.
On the other hand, IF it has been automatically generated and sent, it cannot have any legal value, and so it essentially represents a form of (gratuitious) harassment.
While it is a good thing that Philip Colligan apologised, the essence doesn't "compute", if really the latter was sent to a small number of individuals, then it would have costed nothing to have these letters human-reviewed/checked.
I read as:
- We will be taking over your business that you worked hard to build using our products and promoting our brand.
I feel that they betrayed the open source and maker community, may sound harsh, but limiting the usage of the image/brand like this is not justifiable.
"You may not: ... use the Raspberry Pi Word Mark as part of the domain name for your website"
I thought it used to be possible to register X-is-crap.com for your web site that tells the world exactly how you feel about X, even if X was a registered trade mark, provided you're using X to refer to "genuine" X. If this has changed, when did it change?
If you treat it as a licensing agreement or a contract instead, it would be plausible to include clauses like this. "You may do A, B and C, but you may not do D" = "by entering into this agreement you acquire the rights to do A, B and C in return for foregoing the right to do D". That would be perfectly fine.
I don't see anything in the document that grants you rights you didn't already have (to use RPi's IP only in accordance with fair use). Additionally, it describes itself as "guidelines" and never as a contract or an agreement. So, bad faith it is.
Here's a substantial review of the treatment of "gripe sites" in US law [0]. In general, the legal situation has been that if your site is non-commercial, then your use of the trademark, including in a domain name, is protected free speech.
Of course sometimes mark holders will avoid going after the bigger fish where possible, just in case, unless they have a very strong case (obvious deliberate misuse of the mark).
Not legal advice. Personal opinion, in no way relates to my employment.
If someone is taking something from you, even for free or with payment in "recognition dollars", trade is happening.
And legally required or not, publicly acting to defend the mark may put off others using something similar which is presumably the desire. A bit of a bully-boy tactic perhaps, but again I'm stating the fact rather than judging it.
Caveat: I'm no copyright expert or otherwise legally experienced, other groups do things differently so perhaps there would be a way.
That's a bit like "please provide your name, surname, oh and all passwords"
To prevent this cease and desist from happening, either send written permission to the Raspberry Pi Foundation to use the logo or the Raspberry Pi Foundation should provide 'Allowed uses' or 'Community uses' of the logo / trademark that don't require their permission.
This is all up to them to approve of course and if they have forgotten about this and try this again, just show them the permission for their approval. However, they can also revoke it at any time...
Now, whether you believe that or think it's just damage control is another discussion, but clearly the Foundation is balancing the relationship they have with their community against actual trademark infringement attempts, and your take is a bit off the mark.
What they are okay with is utilizing their name in the titles of articles/posts/blogs/etc. And with that, I'm perfectly okay.
IANAL, etc, maybe someone can clarify.
It might also be argued that the RPi Foundation wasn't aware of these websites and that they took action as soon as they learned about this, which they are basically obligated to do. I've certainly never heard about them and I doubt people at the RPi Foundation do a lot of searching for other RPi communities when they have their own to manage.
Not legal advice. Personal opinion in no way related to my employment.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...
In general, companies can just enforce it as they see fit, but nothing forces them to do so.
Quotes from the article:
> That matters because Canonical’s actions reflect a much bigger problem: a pervasive and unfounded belief that if you don’t police every unauthorized use of a trademark you are in danger of losing it.
> The circumstances under which a company could actually lose a trademark—such as abandonment and genericide—are quite limited.
It could be argued that "Raspberry Pi" might be more at risk of a genericide than "Ubuntu", but we are still far from it, and I am not even sure enforcing their copyright would help in that case.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/trademark-rules/
Though these rules are a bit wordy and sound legalese rather than guidelines.
It might have been easier if the Pi foundation was named differently, but I understand their position, though IMO a disclaimer that this is an unofficial website (as if the -spy didn't give it away) should be enough.
From an article by the EFF:
> The circumstances under which a company could actually lose a trademark—such as abandonment and genericide—are quite limited. Genericide […] is very rare […]. Courts also set a very high bar to show abandonment (usually years of total non-use). Importantly, failure to enforce a mark against every potential infringer does not show abandonment.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...
Pay your renewal fee.
AFAIK, corrections more than welcome, there is no legal basis for this idea that you can lose a trademark by not challenging an infringer. You can certainly lose damages: you can't wait until someone built a £million business and then say 'oops, now we take your money'.
If it were true then after 8 years RaspberryPi would have lost their mark, surely.
Not legal advice. Personal comment in no way relating to my employment.
Why would anyone ever just transfer the domain over immediately?