On 2018年02月14日 06:45, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
.... yes. my understanding is that Trademarks and Cerfitication Marks, by being covered *by* Copyright Law, are in effect a sub-branch of Copyright.
No, copyright has nothing to do with them. Why do you think copyright has anything to do with anything you are doing?
Copyright is a legal monopoly on the copying and distribution of a work. It was originally invented in Britain as a form of censorship, where the monarch would approve printers to print books in the form of a temporary monopoly. The current incarnation of copyright exists with the justification of encouraging the creation of works, e.g. books. It has nothing whatsoever to do with names or certifications. All that documentation could be in the public domain and it would make absolutely no difference. Heck, a lot of corporate logos are in the public domain; you can't copyright fonts, and logos like that of SONY are nothing but printed text, meaning they can't be copyrighted.
IANAL, of course.
the key thing is that i am *required* to be FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory). if the entity known as "ronwirring" were just simply told to bugger off, he could perfectly reasonably claim, under trademark / certification mark / copyright law (whichever it is) that he had been "discriminated against" by me, the (copyright) owner of the EOMA68 Certification Mark.
That's an issue with patent licensing, yet another completely different issue you're lumping together with this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing
But let's assume that certification marks don't allow you to discriminate against people in relation to it. That would be the granting of certification. Have you threatened to deny certification arbitrarily? No? Good. No one has to be a member of a random mailing list to get certification for a product.
Still not a lawyer, still not legal advice, of course.