[lubuntu-users] lubuntu projects from Asian community blocked due to DMCA Copyright and Trademark Claims

[Walter Lapchynski]

On 2018-01-05 09:10, Hong Phuc Dang wrote:
> Please pardon my ignorance but I still don’t understand what is
> wrong about starting a new documentation project and a new chat
> channel where we - Asian contributors feel more comfortable and can
> freely learn and freely work on things that we care about

That certainly sounds great. Contributions to Lubuntu are gladly
welcomed by anyone. However, it seems that the entirety of the project
was focused on filtering stuff to lubuntu.net, an unofficial website
unmaintained by the Lubuntu Team that no one on the team has access to.
This, unfortunately, means that most Lubuntu users will never see these
contributions. Across Canonical/Ubuntu's websites, Distro Watch,
Wikipedia, the upstream LXDE/Qt websites themselves, and many other
places, you'll find lubuntu.me as the official website. 

If you find for some reason that it's not reasonable to work with the
tools that Canonical provides for the documentation of Lubuntu
(primarily the wiki), that's reasonable. It's certainly something that
we as a team could work together towards coming up with a system to
integrate contributions on GitHub with either the current website, our
Phabricator instance, the wiki, etc. As far as I know, no one in
FOSSASIA contacted the team about this at all. Otherwise, I imagine
everything would have fallen within the Lubuntu Team's GitHub
organization.

> If we are violating US laws, we need to be informed officially by the
> authorities in order to take further actions.

Canonical is a UK company and has trademarks against the Ubuntu name
(and variants thereof, such as Lubuntu) globally. There are trademarks
in US, Germany, Australia, Israel, as well as international trademarks
registered with WIPO Madrid. They cover a wide variety of classes,
including not only the distribution of software but online
communications. These trademarks also cover both so-called word marks
and service marks. Though there certainly are laws related to trademarks
in the US, and that is most likely the basis which GitHub used to take
down the repos, the laws are also international.

The [Ubuntu Intellectual Property Policy][1] makes the issue at hand
very clear:

"You will require Canonical’s permission to use: (i) any mark ending
with the letters UBUNTU or BUNTU which is sufficiently similar to the
Trademarks or any other confusingly similar mark, and (ii) any Trademark
in a domain name or URL"

That said, the documentation efforts sound very exciting and I'm sure
Lubuntu users would love to have them. What can we do to integrate your
work with the rest of the project?

[1]:
https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/intellectual-property-policy
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