requesting a trademark license for our community

[delhage at gmail.com]

On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 17:42, Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 04:12:48PM -0500, Paul Frields wrote:
>> On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 6:04 PM, Mostafa Daneshvar
>> <mostafa.daneshvar at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Dear Board;
>> > We, as Iranian community, want your permission to use
>> > "fedoraproject.ir".One of our members registered it without considering
>> > related regulations mentioned in
>> > "http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal/".
>> > within these few months this community attracted a lot of users,nearly
>> > 510 registered. According to logs our   website approximately has 5000
>> > pages view each day. Our forum has 5500 posts (up to now).
>> > Considering our efforts within this time, we need your license to
>> > continue our efforts. We need to grant us to use Fedora logo in our
>> > website.
>> >
>> > We should be thankful for your immediate response
>>
>> Thank you for you email -- we're looking into this now, and will get
>> back to you as soon as we can.
>
>
> As you may know, US federal law currently places sweeping restrictions
> on US citizens' and corporations' ability to transact with certain
> people, organizations, and nations.  The list of embargoed nations
> includes Cuba, Iran, Libya, and North Korea, among others.
>
> The "Fedora" trademarks are regsitered worldwide to Red Hat, Inc.,
> which administers them on behalf of the Fedora community.  Because Red
> Hat is a US-based company, it must adhere to the restrictions imposed
> by US law.  Therefore, we cannot grant a trademark license for the use
> of "Fedora" in your domain name, nor for use of the Fedora logo or
> other trademarks.
>
> I noted from your email that one of your community members registered
> the "fedoraproject.ir" domain.  I'll send you a further email to
> discuss this issue.
>
> I sincerely regret not being able to accommodate your request.
>

This is very disturbing to me if it's true. We have here a community
of people that are being restricted from participating in the global
Fedora community because of arbitrary US restrictions. I really hope
that we can find a way to circumvent (yes) these restrictions. Will
Red Hat try to enforce the trademarks in this case? Will it use it's
legal powers to try and shutdown fedoraproject.ir? I would like to get
a public clarification regarding this issue and an explanation how two
of the four F's, "Freedom" and "Friends" are compatible with this
policy.


Thanks,

Lars

-- 
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