Bonum Certa Men Certa

Debian trademark canceled

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 23, 2024

Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.

In November, I submitted a request to the Swiss intellectual property office to cancel the Debian trademark registration. In the request, I noted that the main reason for cancelation is my lack of confidence in the Swiss legal system. This is explained in much more detail in my earlier blog about Parreaux, Thiebaud & Partners / Justicia SA.

The fact that a small group of lawyers decided to fly too close to the sun is not very dramatic if it happened in isolation. What makes this case so outrageous is that the practices of Parreaux, Thiebaud & Partners were known to the bar associations for a number of years and yet the rogue firm continued trading. News reports told us they had 450 clients in 2018. A LinkedIn post from Mr Parreaux tells us he had 20,000 clients when the financial regulator shut him down in 2023. How many of those 20,000 clients could have been saved if the bar association and FINMA had acted two years earlier in 2021? They knew and they failed to protect the public and small businesses.

In every other industry, ethical disputes such as this can be escalated to the judiciary. For example, if there are disputes about a doctor or an airline pilot, they may initially resolve the matter within a professional body or they may escalate the dispute into the courts. The legal profession is unique in that it is the only profession that regulates itself. If lawyers can not resolve misconduct within their own ranks, there is no other profession who can come in and do it for them.

The only example that is remotely similar is that of the Catholic Church, where they decided they could ignore national regulations about abuse and investigate the complaints under Cannon Law. They even published the Crimen Sollicitationis, their own secret Code of Conduct for investigating abuse. Crimen Sollicitationis tells bishops that abuse cases should be kept hidden. We see exactly the same thing in Switzerland where FINMA published a verdict that redacts the names of the rogue lawyers so clients would be unlikely to ever find it.

FINMA, Parreaux Thiébaud & Partners, Justicia SA, Justiva SA, Mathieu Parreaux

While concern about the integrity of the Swiss legal profession is a significant factor in my decision to cancel the trademark, I want to emphasize one other point from the attempts to censor various web sites using the UDRP. In each of the censorship cases, aggressors have argued that independent web sites run the risk of tarnishing the trademark. In the case of Debian, I can't think of anything that tarnishes the trademark more than the repeated deaths of volunteers, including the volunteer who resigned to commit suicide on the Debian Day anniversary and in the middle of the 2023 legal vendettas, in the middle of the Debian annual conference DebConf23, another volunteer died in avoidable circumstances. Given the enormous damage that these avoidable deaths do to both the brand and the community, it feels absurd to spend money fighting over whether some independent web site has tarnished the trademark too.

If you have registered domain names containing the Debian trademark then it is recommended that you seek advice about whether your web site content meets the criteria for legitimate interests under the UDRP or similar fair use frameworks that apply in your jurisdiction. The judgment about the Scientologie.org domain name provides an interesting example where the right of copyright interests was deemed to be superior to the trademark rights. As all Debian Developers have copyright interests in our work, the Scientologie.org precedent gives us a strong defence against malicious UDRP cases.

From a practical perspective, if the Scientologie.org precedent authorizes legitimate interest and fair use web sites using the Debian domain name then it feels wasteful to spend large amounts of time and money arguing over which authors can have a trademark registration.

The ball is now in Jonathan Carter's court to decide whether he wants to continue vendettas into 2024 or whether he wants to use the Christmas season as an opportunity to bury the hatchet and stop attacking my family and I. Rogue elements of the Debian community began attacking my family at a time when I lost two family members. It reflects something uniquely bad about Debian culture and leadership.

Other Recent Techrights' Posts

[Meme] Wayland at Every Cost
Fedora DEI and Wayland
Audio: Julian Assange Tells US Judge That Espionage Act and First Amendment Contradict One Another, But Pleads Guilty (to Save His Life)
Have a listen to Julian Assange and the judge in Saipan
How to Help Pay Assange Debt (£520,000 Plane Bill and Beyond)
Budget travel was not permitted
Wikipedia Co-Founder (Not Wales) Expresses Support for Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange, Says Assange Will Probably Continue
probably exactly the sort of thing that the US prosecutors did not want
Windows in Åland Islands: From 100% to Less Than Half
Åland Islands lost the sense of urgency to move to GNU/Linux
Not Just Slow News But Also Late News (Julian Assange Landing in Thailand)
Why did AP take so long (nearly a week) to release these?
[Meme] Smart Alec Poettering
How many Microsofters can the Debian Project withstand?
Getting Rid of Microsoft Does Not Go Far Enough
Microsoft already has many problems. One day Microsoft won't exist anymore. But that does not guarantee users' freedom.
Alyssa Rosenzweig's LibrePlanet Talk About Freeing the Apple GPU
Alyssa Rosenzweig is the graphics witch behind the reverse-engineered drivers for the Apple GPU. She previously led Panfrost, the free drivers for Arm Mali GPUs powering devices like the Pinebook Pro. She graduated in 2023 with a Computer Science degree from the University of Toronto and now writes free software full-time.
Links 30/06/2024: LLMs Under Fire and Dictatorship of the Old
Links for the day
 
Elon Musk Killed Not Only the Twitter Bird, He Also Killed the Platform
Today begins the second half of 2024 (2024 H2)
RMS: "I am very glad for Assange for being out of prison, but I am alarmed that the danger of being treated similarly will face other journalists and publishers in the future"
what RMS said about the release of Julian Assange
What Richard Stallman (RMS) Thinks of Paying With Cash or 'Cashless Society'
RMS: Don't be tracked
No Discrimination Allowed Against People Who Pay With Cash
City of Philadelphia on cash
Anthony Albanes: Assange's "arrival home ends a long running legal process. [...] We'll have meetings about AUKUS and other arrangements over coming days as well."
Official transcript
4.04 Linux Not Found, No Such Agency (NSA)
The CoCs never failed Microsoft
Julian Assange Turns 53 in a Couple of Days, Give Him the Gift of Freedom From Debt
Julian Assange turns 53 on Wednesday
IBM's Abandonment of Disabled People (Orca and Wayland Incompatibility) Has Basically Killed Their "DEI" Channel (Room)
The "DEI" channel (Matrix room) as been silent for 4 days
[Meme] Just Because You Throw Money at Lawyers Doesn't Mean You'll Win
Welcome to the second half of 2024
Paulo Henrique Santana (Collabora) on the Debian Brazil Community
There was similar material in DebConf22
Making the Wikileaks Site More Active Again (and Gradually Exiting "X" or Other Social Control Media)
As soon as Assange got kidnapped the Wikileaks Web site reached a near-standstill
Marco Calegaro on Hacking Art Into a Community
talk by Marco Calegaro
Links 01/07/2024: Chokecherry Leaf and Agile Manifesto
Links for the day
Johannes Åsgård on Making the Raspberry Pi More Free With librerpi
Johannes (also known as dolphinana)
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 30, 2024
IRC logs for Sunday, June 30, 2024
200 This Week
Monday started with 40 articles/pages and this is #200
Press Complicity and Public Apathy All Along Enabled 14 Years of Illegal, Arbitrary Detention and Coercion Into Plea Bargain of Julian Assange on Brink of Death
They basically blackmailed him into letting the US 'win' the argument
At the End Journalism a Crime (If It Involves Accessing or Gaining Access to Documents Marked "Confidential" or "Classified" by Those Looking to Hide Their Misconduct/Crimes)
At least in the US, especially where the imperialism is at stake
Links 30/06/2024: Tensions in Korea and Japan, Criminalisation of Sleeping Outdoors
Links for the day
100% Slop/Spam From linuxsecurity.com
This is the kind of stuff that's killing the Web faster
Gemini Links 30/06/2024: Murdoch and Ideal OS
Links for the day
In the First 6 Months of 2024 Thailand Moved to GNU/Linux, Not to Windows Vista 11
maybe users moved from Vista 10 and 11 to GNU/Linux, seeing where Microsoft was heading with forced hardware "upgrades"
Eko K. A. Owen, New Outreach and Communications Coordinator for the FSF
Nice to see many new additions to the FSF's team
Microsoft Has Slaves and Enablers, Not Partners
Obligatory meme too
Tobias Platen Covered Freedom-To-Play Games in LibrePlanet 2024
Freedom-To-Play games using Taler
[Meme] Opening a 'Webapp' With 'Only' 4 GB of RAM
Until 2020 none of my PCs ever had more than 2 GB of RAM
Destination 'Five Percent'
We reckon GNU/Linux can break the 5% barrier some time by the end of this year, even without counting Chromebooks
A Crisis of Online Journalism
Almost a week ago a journalist was forced to plead guilty for an act of journalism
Germany One of Many Countries Where Microsoft's Bing Lost Market Share After All That LLM Nonsense (Bing Chat and Further Rebrands/Renames)
openai.com traffic plunged 60% last month
Microsoft’s Latest Antitrust Scrutiny
4 new stories
Microsoft Layoffs, Mass Plagiarism, and More
outrage included
[Meme] Walking Outside the Guardrails of the Walled Gardens Built by Monopolies
So-called "advertiser-unfriendly" material was never a problem for Wikileaks
GNU/Linux Climbed 0.25% This Month (in statCounter)
Around midday on Tuesday we'll start seeing preliminary data for July
Ilya Gulko Introduces Pollyanna
"Pollyanna is a web framework that makes it easy to create your own libre social space, such as a social network or blog."
'FSFE': Underage Labour, GAFAM Fronting, and Identity Theft to Undermine the FSF's Current Fundraiser
looking to raise funds at the same time as the FSF
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 29, 2024
IRC logs for Saturday, June 29, 2024
Links 29/06/2024: Astronauts at Risk, Ukraine Updates
Links for the day
Fedora and Red Hat Leftovers
mostly redhat.com
Microsoft is Now Googlebombing or Spamming 'Open Source' and 'Linux' to Promote Proprietary Surveillance, Azure
Notice the title and the image, what's being promoted etc.
Seychelles: GNU/Linux Doing OK
Seychelles cannot be considered poor
This War Crime Footage, Nothing Political Per Se, Is What They Made Julian Assange Plead Guilty To (War Criminals Not Convicted, Only Those Who Expose Them)
Wikileaks' Julian Assange: Exposing the US Military Crimes
Gemini Protocol Isn't Even Remotely "Dead"
"Lupa knows of 505,000 (half a million!) working Gemini URLs at present, up from about 425,000 this time last year"
About 10 New Free Software Foundation (FSF) Members Per Day
The total changed from 46 to 47 while typing the article
20 Years Passed, Let's Go Even Faster Now
We are hoping to bring more original stories
Vista 11 Adoption Unusually Low in Germany and It's Going Down, Not Up
This is not happening only in Germany
Kevin Korte on Computers Being Allowed to Make Decisions Based on Cryptic Algorithms and Proprietary/Secret Data
It uses buzzwords where none are needed
[Meme] Garbage In, Garbage Out (linuxsecurity.com)
It is neither Linux nor security, just chatbot-generated slop
Microsoft-Invaded CISA Spreads Anti-Free Software FUD (as If Proprietary Software Has No Memory Safety Issues), Brittany Day Uses Chatbots to Amplify and Permutate the Microsoft FUD
linuxsecurity.com became an anti-Linux spam site
Microsoft Laying Off Staff in an Act of Retaliation and Union-Busting
retaliatory layoffs at Microsoft
Gemini Links 29/06/2024: Content Drowning in 'Goo' and LLM Slop
Links for the day
Windows Lost Almost 92% Market Share in Egypt
From over 99% to just over 7%
In Ecuador, GNU/Linux Adoption Surged From Under 1% to Over 4% in About 3 Years
Not even counting Chromebooks
LibrePlanet: Cultivating Backups (of Recordings)
an appeal to recover some of these talks
Microsoft/Windows Machines Are Turned Off (or Windows Deleted/Decommissioned) in Web Servers, as the "Market Share" Collapse Continues
Taking full history into account, this is a decrease of over 90% in some cases
Corwin Brust Hosting Freedom: A Behind-the-scenes Tour With the GNU Savannah Hackers
"the "smiling faces" behind it."
Android at 90% or More in Chad
Windows below 2%
David Wilson: Cultivating a Welcoming Free Software Community That Lasts
"a feeling of shared ownership for all users."
Julian Assange Might Continue Wikileaks, But Certainly Not Yet (Recovery Time Needed)
And probably at a symbolic capacity only
Bringing in 12 Santas and Taking 13 Out (Old Interview With Julian Assange)
Julian Assange's life inside the Ecuadorian embassy
Neil Plotnick on GNU/Linux in the High School Classroom
uploaded to the LibrePlanet instance of MediaGoblin
Asia Appears to be Fastest to Adopt GNU/Linux
the home of a considerable majority of the world's population
Alexandre Oliva's LibrePlanet 2024 Talk About "Software Enshittification"
in spite of technical difficulties encountered while recording
What They Used to Do With Mono They Now Do With Systemd (Lower and Deeper Down Than Userspace)
Now we have a project started primarily by Red Hat (and managed by Microsoft GitHub, which is proprietary) being managed by Microsoft and primarily serving Microsoft and IBM
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 28, 2024
IRC logs for Friday, June 28, 2024