darwinports.com legal action

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 7, 2010, at 17:36, Joshua Root wrote:

> Thanks for taking this on. The MacPorts Project is, legally, just a
> collection of individuals. MacPorts is not a registered trademark.
> (Neither is/was DarwinPorts.) We're not really happy about that being
> the state of affairs, but when we looked into creating a legally
> recognised organisation, we concluded that it would be too expensive.

I haven't looked into nonprofit organizations, but for comparison, to start an LLC in the U.S. only costs a couple hundred dollars, as does registering a trademark. And I understand we have some money available from past Google Summer of Code projects.

Of course, if we registered a trademark, we'd have to enforce it and go after everyone who uses the name without permission. (There are probably a half dozen sites I've found that use MP or DP in their names and are confusing e.g. in that they don't say they aren't an official site.)

My impression is that Apple is interested in having MacPorts be useful and successful. It has therefore occurred to me to ask if Apple Legal would be interested in taking on this issue for us. But I have not asked them.