“Remove occurrences of the short name of the Debian derivative from Canonical”

Here's how I understand Canadian trademark law. There will be commonalities and important differences with other jurisdictions.

In Canada, one cannot trade mark an existing dictionary word. One can trademark a representation of a word. Canonical being a dictionary word, it cannot be trademarked in Canada - but particular combinations of colour, font, background, images could be trademarked.

Ubuntu is also a dictionary word - just not in an English or French dictionary, the ones best known to CIPO (Canadian Intellectual Property Office) and its associated bits of the government.

So theoretically, one cannot trademark Ubuntu, the word. There are Canadian trademarks for representations of the word, but they have nothing to do with computers and Canonical.

Having said that, "novel" combinations of ordinary dictionary words can be trademarked. I never bothered to registered "EdgeKeep" and "Securing the Edge", but I marked them as trademarks - (TM) instead of (R) - everywhere I used them. Had there ever been a dispute, precedent would have been on my side, but I could have lost to deep pockets.

For example, Office cannot be trademarked as just a word, in most jurisdictions most of the time, but Microsoft Office can be.

My understanding is that some jurisdictions limit the dictionary word restriction to specific languages, but whether this is de jure or de facto (by law or by convention), I do not know.

So this gets complicated really quickly, because ubuntu and canonical are just words, Ubuntu and Canonical refer to specific products and companies, the U&C terms may be trademarkable in some jurisdictions but not all, and, in any case...

...if one needs to refer to Canonical the company, then one may, despite that word being potentially trademarked in one or more jurisdictions. Whether one may make as liberal reference to the products of that company is another question.

But IANAL, and even if I was, it might not matter until a judge spoke on this particular question, or a relevantly similar one.

Fun, eh?

PS I really, really like the idea of using "RestrictedDerivativeBy<insertAdjectiveHere>Company" instead of Ubuntu or Canonical, because it makes the point so much better in a sarcastic and humourous way. It makes all of the above moot, but when did mootness ever stop a good debate? :->

IANAL, but as far as I understand US law (it's crazy, but everybody needs to learn it nowadays), the first use is explicitly permitted, while a passing citation in documentation is a more nebulous issue.

Then, It is a bit paranoid, but Debian people work very har to clear their distro from any IP risk, and writting down the name of that distro that can not be named is now a risk.

I accept that point.

(TBH, I shouldn't have bothered with my previous comment, because it was just pedantic).

In my mind, Ubuntu is competing (or at least trying to compete) with Google, Microsoft and Apple. They can't afford to waste valuable front page space on things that would only interest people like us. I think that's perfectly understandable. They still have an Ubuntu and Debian page for those who care. If sharing credit is important to you, than by all means go with something like Crunchbang.

> Complaints regarding trademark infringement due to website content and domain names are outside of ICANN's scope and authority.

The only case where ICANN Has anything to say is in a case of domain squatting, which this isn't: although Canonical has a trademark interest in "Ubuntu", there's no violation since it's being used nominatively,and it's not being used in bad faith. (Search for UDRP for more information on this policy).

You're right that copyright and trademark law are two different things. That said, the word "trademark" occurs on that page only in the footer, applied to the name Debian. Nowhere (on that page at least) are the images asserted as trademarks, whereas there's a prominent copyright notice near each logo. I suppose the copyright could be read to apply to the license text and not to the logo, although that would be odd, and inconsistent with the explicit copyright wording of the open use logo.