[OSM-talk] Branding?

[Jonathan Bennett]

On 23/02/2013 07:24, Robin Paulson wrote:
> How do we reconcile relatively permissive use of the OSM database, with
> relatively restrictive use of the Open Street Map name? For the moment,
> I put to one side Stallman's argument that "there is no such thing as
> intellectual property" [1].

In the same way that Stallman, via the GPL, says "To protect your 
rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or 
asking you to surrender the rights."

To prevent other people from fooling you into thinking what they're 
distributing is Free, open geodata, we need to protect OpenStreetMap as 
a trademark. It stands for something, and that something is too 
important to simply let anyone use our name for anything they choose.

There's work going on to strike a balance between protecting ourselves 
as a community, and allowing local groups to self-organise. As a member 
of CWG I'm contributing to that work, but anyone else is welcome to join in.

J.