Linking to Red Hat Without Permission
I’m linking to Red Hat(R) without permission. Mwah ha ha ha ha! MWAH ha ha ha ha! MWAH HA HA HA HA! Red Hat(R) has a stern Trademark policy and are giving the good folks at Centos a hard time about it. Their stupid letter now on Centos’ front page purports to prevent linking without permission. Ummm. Welcome to the internet, Red Hat(R)! So glad you could join us!
I’ve been wanting to write something about this, but have been a bit short on time. Their TM policy is so extreme it seems to me it might even be attempting to prevent purely descriptive uses of their marks, which TM law doesn’t allow TM-holders to prevent (this might even be TM misuse), or it could almost be active inducement of TM infringement because they know people copy GNU/Linux distributions like theirs (that’s the point!) yet they‘ve intentionally designed their distribution and their TM policy so that it takes a computer whiz to figure out how to strip every occurrence of ‘Red Hat‘(R) or the Fedora Hat Image from the CDs. (This last paragraph is chock full of untested and novel legal theories that I don’t have time to discuss or explain. I’ll get to it at some point.)
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