Flock Trademark

Before too terribly long, we’ll publish a big boring document about trademarks. I read the thing a couple of weeks ago and, no offense to Bart, who authored much of the original document for Mozilla and who tweaked it for our purposes, but it’s not exactly fun reading. We had had a couple of queries about using some of the graphics from our theme (and in one case porting our theme to Firefox), and several of us made some time to discuss the matter last week.

Our theme is a little problematic because a lot of it looks a lot like our logo. There’s nothing essentially Firefoxy about the default Firefox theme, but there is something distinctly Flockish about our nav buttons. And, like Firefox, we need to protect our logo and derived images pretty aggressively in order to preserve our brand. So it was a pretty sticky issue for us, and one not devoid of some contention. But we worked out something that I think is good for the community and for Flock. Full boring details will follow later, but here’s the quick take on trademark as it relates to theme assets, at lest:

  • Soon, we’ll be releasing a different default theme with checkouts of the source code. Right now, we’re thinking it’ll include gray versions of the current icons. All assets included in the theme will be licensed under the GPL and thus available for community use.
  • Eventually, we’ll be releasing an official version of the Flock theme for Firefox because, well, our theme is cool, but some people just aren’t ready or willing to make the switch. We’ll grant permission to use these assets at our discretion under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. If you want to use the assets, in other words, ask us. If your request seems reasonable (ie, you’re not using our buttons for unsavory purposes that would defame Flock or otherwise hurt our brand), chances are that we’ll license the assets to you.

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