On Trademarks by in Copyright and DRM / August 19th, 2005
Read: Slashdot and then more on Groklaw. Trademarks for Linux. This relates to my ongoing obsession. I’ll speak about it in terms of DSR, which is where the fun is.
It’s established that Dustrunners is being released, nuts and bolts and all, under a CC-NC-SA license. So you can write you own story, draw pics of characters, or really do anything you like with the idea with almost no restrictions (except for commercial, which is an issue for another post). So if anyone can write about Spastik and create their own books based on him, what’s to stop someone from writing absolute garbage about Spaz and effectively muddying the waters for everyone else?
That’s where the trademark comes in. The Dustrunners trademark is controlled by the central body, and is not freely useable. If you write a DSR-themed story and want to use the official wordmark, you have to get it authorized. To be authorized, your work needs to pass a test of being canonical… which is to say, Spastik has to be a human male from Australia, and not a cyborg woman from the planet Butu. Assuming the content checks out as being inline with the worldview consensus on the afore-mentioned DustWiki, you would be granted the use of the Dustrunners name and logo for your work.
Now that’s not to say that not being canonical marks the end of your existence. There may be stories that emerge that break too much from the DSR world but are fundamentally cool. They could still thrive out on the wild net without and hindrance, because the CC license still allows Spastik to roam free. The only restriction would be that it could not be called “Dustrunners” (although the term “dustrunner” would still be useable in the stories themselves).
A trademark is like a quality assurance emblem. It says “yes, this is a Dustrunners story, and it conforms to the standards you expect.” Watching or reading one DSR-branded show will keep you in the same familiar world as in the last one you saw. As with Linux, it’s not about cashing in on a term, it’s about ensuring that the end-user can trust something based on its cover, to some degree.
