Re: FW: trademark filings for GCC?

[Carl Oppedahl <carl at oppedahl dot com>]

At 09:49 PM 7/10/2003, Richard Stallman wrote:

> Since you related your offer to help us obtain GCC as a trademark to a
> wish to help the "open source community", I had better say that while
> we would appreciate your help, we don't consider GCC to be an "open
> source" activity and we don't think of our community as the "open source"
> community.

I realized, shortly after I typed the message, that I was putting my foot 
into it by my choice of words.  I hope you can appreciate that what I am 
trying to do is say "thank you" for the efforts of you and others.

> Eben Moglen says having GCC as a trademark would be a good thing, so
> please do that if you wish.  However, there are many other kinds of
> legal help that we need more crucially.  Might you be amenable to
> helping us in other ways?

I have a lot of experience with patents and copyrights and trademarks ... 
and very little experience in other areas.  My law firm is also quite small 
(two lawyers total) and thus we can only support *small* pro-bono matters, 
not large ones.  Our economics only permit doing about one pro-bono 
litigation at a time, and yet during recent years we have often taken on 
two or more at a time, which is quite a strain for us financially.

Our firm has also given enormous amounts of time to a nonprofit Internet 
coop which you may enjoy reading about at http://www.rric.net/faq/ .

Please take no offense but our small firm has resources to do free 
trademark work but it is quite a strain to take on larger projects.

Having said all this, let's turn to the idea of a trademark registration 
for GCC.  To move forward on this I need help with a few things.

Who is to be the owner of the trademark registration?  Free Software 
Foundation, I would imagine, but please tell me as I may not have guessed 
right about that.

Where is the owner incorporated?  Massachusetts?  Elsewhere?

The US Trademark Office requires us to say what the trademark relates 
to.  My best guess is "Compiler software".  Does that sound right to you?

The US Trademark Office requires us to say when the mark was first used in 
interstate commerce.  In this context I expect we are talking about the 
first time somebody FTPd the software using the name GCC.  From your 
timeline I am guessing it is more or less July 31, 1999.  I should 
emphasize that the Trademark Office does not require us to figure out the 
exact date.  It suffices to specify some date that is known to be on or 
after the actual first date.  So if we err on the side of being more recent 
that is no problem for the US Trademark Office.