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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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How to throw away good publicity 11 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Part of the problem is trademark law. If you have a trademark, you have to control its use and you can't let just anyone use it for anything. You have to defend its use so it's actaully a mark of the trade that you do and not a generic mark that anyone uses. A trademark is used to distinguish what you do against what other people do. That's the point, and the law says that you have to do various things to defend your mark.

    Python, on the other hand, apparently isn't using their images as an actual trademark
    • You make a good point. I guess my question is, why does there need to be a Perl trademark in that way? What benefit does it provide to TPF and the wider Perl community?
      • The benefit to TPF is clear: they can mark officially supported projects as part of TPF. When you see the Onion logo, you know you are looking at something from the TPF. Thus, TPF controls how its reputation and perception are used.

        TPF has obvious benefit to the wider community, and them taking the completely reasonable and usual steps to protect their reputation and perception through their mark is normal business. As TPF conducts themselves with due diligence, they can be an effective organization and con
        • Heh. Well, I would prefer if someone officially associated with Perl were to do that, as grink commented, and give public use their blessing.

          I think a lot of people feel it's a pity that when a (great) logo finally appears for Perl, after years of the community having to piggyback on an O'Reilly trademark, that we're not actually allowed to use it. Good design unfortunately appears to be in short supply in the Perl world, for reasons I don't understand; perhaps because the lack of perceived "glamor" doesn

          • The idea of getting a TPF trademark was so we'd have a logo we (the Perl community) could use freely. I intentionally drafted the trademark policy [perlfoundation.org] very simply, so we wouldn't get bogged down in horrible formalities every time someone wanted to use the trademark. The policy explicitly grants free use to the Perl Mongers groups and Perl Monks, which covers a huge section of the Perl community.

            The basic rule for anything else is "if you're not sure it's an acceptable use from the trademark page, just email us and we'll let you know." So far, I've approved almost every request that's gone to the trademark (at) perlfoundation (dot) org alias. Pulling up a few from my email archive: it's used by Birmingham.pm [pm.org], and Brasil Perl Mongers [perl.org.br] for their websites, was used by the San Francisco Perl Mongers on a banner to display at conferences, at several Perl workshops and conferences around the world for t-shirts and other swag, and Omaha.pm printed out business cards for group members to use when inviting others to the meetings.

            To keep the trademark, we do have to grant permission for any uses outside the trademark policy, but that permission isn't anything more complex than an email from us saying it's okay.
            • Thanks for commenting, Allison.

              You say:

              The policy explicitly grants free use to the Perl Mongers groups and Perl Monks, which covers a huge section of the Perl community.

              I have to take issue with you there. The policy you linked to says:

              This authorization to use the Perl logo is limited to uses by the organizations themselves, and doesn't extend to individual members.

              That certainly doesn't seem to be a huge section of the community.

              To keep the trademark, we do have to grant permission for any use

            • Lets say I, as an individual and enthusiast for Perl, had a blog. For one of my entries in that blog, discussing Perl, I wanted to have a "soft" (blending with the background color) image of the onion scaled up and embedded as part of the background image. In addition, maybe part of the logo would be occluded off the side of the page.

              How would this fall under acceptable use?

              Phrases like "Marks must be used in their entirety. Any variation in the form of the mark must be approved in advance in writing by TPF

              • Phrases like "Marks must be used in their entirety. Any variation in the form of the mark must be approved in advance in writing by TPF." make me think that any alteration is forbidden

                I'm not sure where you get the idea that "must be approved in advance" means the same thing as "is forbidden".

                Allison has already said that they approve the vast majority of requests.



                • I've always hated the process of using the logo. Because it's a trademark it's a pain to use. There is nothing stopping anyone starting their own logo which will be much more popular (and less controlled, yay) than the camel or onion logos. Centralisation is not always the best solution.
                • Fair enough. I wasn't aware of Allison's stance before reading this thread though.

                  Perhaps the TPF trademark page could have some friendly advice on usage, besides (the necessary) legalese. Something like hex's suggestions (aping Python)'s below.
            • I was just reading through the Python trademark guidelines [python.org] again... do you think it would be reasonable for the Perl mark guidelines to have "Uses that Never Require Approval" and "Uses that Always Require Approval", much as theirs have? Conceivably, that could allow legal fair use of the trademark without TPF having to approve everything.
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