Re: cowsay could attract copyright and trademark enforcement action

[Leo Prikler]

Am Mittwoch, den 14.07.2021, 09:57 -0400 schrieb Bone Baboon:
> [...]
> 
> In this response to the pull request I submitted about the
> questionable files in the cowsay repository
> <
> https://github.com/tnalpgge/rank-amateur-cowsay/pull/4#issuecomment-878092487
> >
> apjanke is requesting feedback.
> 
> > If there are any actual IP lawyers, relevant IP owners, or
> > distributions who redistribute cowsay who would like to weigh in on
> > this, I'd definitely like to hear what you have to say.
> 
> For those who want to respond to apjanke but do not have or do not
> want to use a GitHub account I can link this email thread in the
> discussion about the pull request.
I am not an IP lawyer, nor do I own any of said characters, but I'd
like to point out that not all jurisdictions follow the US model.  In
Germany for example, you can (in the near future/already?) not use more
than 160 characters of copyrighted material -- granted, the cowfiles
are shorter than that, but copyright law is troubling over here in
Europe nonetheless.

Furthermore:
> Given that this is a noncommercial work [...] [a]nd they're [the
> characters] not being sold
I don't think applies to free as in the case of freedom distributions
like Trisquel or Guix.  A non-commercial clause would be a violation of
the GPL, the very license cowsay is distributed under.  As the author
of cowsay, apjanke could very well ship such characters with it (unless
they themselves also happen to use GPL'd software as dependency in
which they'd be violating that GPL), but unless they can pass on the
freedom to distribute those cows *under the terms of the GPL*, no one
else can either, which would make distributing cowsay with those
characters illegal
1. under trademark law
2. under the terms of the GPL

Clearly, copyright law in 2021 is not broken at all :^)

Regards,
Leo