[OSM-legal-talk] OpenStreetMap's Trademark Licensing Policy

[Frederik Ramm]

Adam,

On 28.06.2012 18:42, asaun056 at uottawa.ca wrote:
> It is unclear to me what OSM/OSMF policy is with regards to third-party
> use of OSM trademarks.

I am not surprised that this is unclear to you because there is no such 
policy, at least not any that's written down!

I have no authority to speak for OSMF, the trademark owner, but I can 
say a few things:

* There were cases in the past where someone has sold a mobile 
application through AppStore et al. the name of which was suitable to 
make people think it was somehow an official or sanctioned product; in 
some of these cases, people have been asked to rename their product.

* No such requests have been made in cases where people have offered 
something that was clearly a tool made to support the project, like "OSM 
relation analyzer" or "OSM inspector" or "ITO OSM analysis" (all three, 
incidentally, made by commercial entities working with OSM).

* Individuals have been doing publications ("My OSM Blog") without 
asking whether it's ok to use the name. I'm one of the authors of a book 
named "OpenStreetMap" and it seems this is ok too.

* National OSM groups all over the world have registered 
"openstreetmap.xx" domains in their respective countries; they don't 
belong to, neither are controlled by, OSMF.

* People have been producing OSM "merchandise" of all sorts - T-Shirts, 
mugs, banners, stickers, pens - without asking OSMF, and nobody ever 
complained.

I guess that I speak for many in the community when I say that don't 
really want to put any obstacles in anybody's way - we wouldn't want 
some eager community member in Brazil to wait for approval before he can 
annouce his OpenStreetMap mapping party! So if we ever adopt a trademark 
policy then it will be as liberal as possible, with a focus on 
prohibiting misleading use of our name (e.g. someone calling something 
"OpenStreetMap" when in fact it isn't, or people making things look like 
we endorsed something we haven't).

But as I said at the beginning, I'm not aware of any policy already in 
existence.

As a rule of thumb, as long as you don't do anything that provokes a 
community outcry you'll probably be ok.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"