Posts Tagged with “rss”

There have been some questions about the RSS icon and trademark protection. The Mozilla Foundation filed a trademark application a while back during the process of evaluating what course of action to take. Same with creating a trademark license to see what it would look like.

After looking at this, we all believe that a community driven approach is best and that trademark licensing don’t make sense for a number of reasons. So several things could happen with the existing trademark application. The Mozilla Foundation could abandon the trademark application. The Mozilla Foundation could commit to managing the trademark only as determined by the community process.

The one thing that I don’t know how to do effectively is to give the mark to some other organization for it to manage. That’s because I don’t know of any generally known and accepted organization for dealing with trademarks. Creative Common is copyright only; the standards bodies aren’t trademark organizations. I’m pretty sure there are organizations that enforce particular marks, but I don’t know of anything analogous to a standards body for enforcing community-governed icons and marks. In the long run having such an organization could be very valuable and I think we’re going to see an increasing need for this. In the meantime, I think the options are as noted above: either the Mozilla Foundation has a trademark and manages it based on community process or we rely entirely on community norms.

My belief is that trying to have the Mozilla Foundation officially responsible for an icon that is already in use is going to cause angst as well as make it harder to have calm discussions about the RSS icon and the proper role for trademark in community-driven activities. This is counterproductive. If abandoning the trademark application (a) makes people feel safer using the mark and/or (b) allows us to have the community-driven trademark discussion in a calmer setting and without suspicion, then withdrawing the trademark application makes sense.

Look for more on the RSS topic from Frank Hecker shortly.

My last post ended with the question: What is the best method of encouraging the use of the RSS icon in Firefox today by many players and still have the icon mean something clear and accurate? There are a few possibilities.

Option 1: The Mozilla Foundation allows the icon to be modified as people want, and to be used on whatever products, services or applications people want to use it on. No one has any particular ability to cause consistency. In other words, we treat the icon like code — use an open source license and turn the icon loose.

This allows maximum flexibility for software vendors and website operators — each can take a recognized image and use it for whatever one want. The flip side is that consumers won’t be able to look at the icon and know what it means. Many consumers are intimidated by the Internet as it is, and struggle to understand the difference between software, search, “the Internet” and data provided by websites. So to my mind, making things clear to the consumer is a high value. The purpose of the icon is to indicate something specific to consumers.

And we know that successful open development efforts have leadership to guide development, not just intellectual property assets floating in the wild. So even this route requires some attention and structure from someone as to how the icon is used, how it develops and how people might want to use the icon.

So to my mind attaching an open source copyright license to the icon and turning it loose seems like a bad plan; one likely to lead to maximum confusion for consumers, and minimum assistance for the groups wanting to create a useful marker for consumers.

Option 2: The other extreme is a classic trademark licensing program. In this setting the Mozilla Foundation licenses the icon as a trademark to everyone on the same terms and has a formal process for managing the evolution and use of the mark. That process might be community focused, and the Mozilla Foundation would be the ultimate decision-maker as the owner of the mark.

The advantage to this system include:

• A level of clarity over the degree to which the icon can be assured to mean something to consumers;
• Having a known “home” for the icon, a known place to bring issues and work out discussions
• Not all organizations show much respect for community norms. Living within a known legal framework provides another tool for responding to bad actors.

Disadvantages include:

• Use of trademark law in open and community processes is new and sometimes not well liked.
• I believe the Free and Open Source Software world is due for a long discussion of trademarks, how we use them, what their value is and so on. Ultimately I’d like to see some Creative Commons type options available for trademark-type purposes. (Creative Commons licenses are all copyright licenses, and do not purport to address the trademark-like issues of providing clarity to consumers about what consumers are getting.) We haven’t had this discussion yet.
• A formal trademark process can be a significant amount of work. The Mozilla Foundation will take that work on for key marks, like its product marks. The Mozilla Foundation should also be willing to take on leadership, organization and work for other marks that are important to the industry, including the RSS icon. However, taking on these activities before we’ve had the trademark discussion could be counter-productive. If we use the RSS icon to start talking about what industry wide icons can and should mean we should come to some shared understanding (or at least shared vocabulary, if not understanding) of the value of an icon and how best to make this visual clues mean something real for consumers.

Option 3: Another option is to try a less formal process with more authority resided in community norms and seeing how that works. To do this the Mozilla Foundation would:

• develop a clear set of community norms and usage guidelines;
• lead a community process for the evolution of the mark and the guidelines; and
• identify a mechanism where companies using the icon (particularly in software products) publicly pledge to the implementation of the guidelines and complying with the results of the community process.

I believe Option 3 is the best approach for the RSS icon at this point in time. People are interested in the icon, people are already using the icon, we can learn how precise a meaning we believe it should have and how community norms function in this setting.

I’m recommending that the Mozilla Foundation adopt Option 3, publish a set of usage guidelines and proposed community norms (potential examples include: public discussion and evaluation before using the icons for new versions of file formats, proposed modifications of the icon, statement of intent that the icon continue to mean something precise to consumers, etc.) and provide a forum for discussion as soon as possible.

Here’s a question with both philosophical underpinnings and a concrete set of product implications. The philosophical side of this question includes questions such as:

• how does a consumer know what web services he or she is requesting?
• How important is consumer clarity?
• How do we encourage clarity across a networked base of products?
• If consumer clarity is important, how do we get this?
• Is it possible to provide consumers this level of clarity without some organized control mechanism?
• Can these issues be managed through a community-based process? Or is a more formal legal structure useful?
• Is community leadership enough, or is an ultimate decision-maker necessary?

The concrete example here is the RSS icon that’s been in Firefox for some time now. Mozilla Firefox includes an icon that represents the availability of an XML based RSS feed. When you click on the icon in the location bar of Firefox you are able to add an RSS feed just as one adds a bookmark. When you click on a bookmark identified with the RSS icon (a “live bookmark” in our parlance) you see the recent entries from that RSS feed. A number of web sites use the same icon to help consumers recognize the presence of an RSS feed that can be added to Firefox or an alternative piece of software that understands RSS feeds (such as a “feed reader”).

A while back Microsoft approached us about using the Mozilla RSS icon in the upcoming version of its browser. We thought that having multiple software products use the same icon to represent the presence of an RSS feed would be helpful to consumers. It would provide a standard visual clue for consumers and provide clarity. Of course, this only works if the icon actually represents something reasonably crisply and accurately. If a single icon comes to be used for many different things then there’s not much benefit to consumers, and might even be some disadvantages. (For example, it would not help consumers to click on the so-called RSS icon and end up downloading some wildly different format.)

So what is the best method of promoting the use of this icon by many players and still have the icon mean something clear and accurate to consumers? In an effort to keep my posts to a digestible length I’ll describe the methods we’ve thought though in the next post.