Trademark laws themselves are a mess of nuances, and even though the Rust Trademark Policy draft is generally not out of ordinary, it unfortunately has failed to help illuminate the most important distinction, that is between nominative use and non-nominative use. This draft is heavily based on Model Trademark Guidelines, which has seen no usage in programming language projects before. It's an unfortunate choice of basis in my opinion, as many controversial clauses are verbatim from it. The Rust Trademark Working Group has not reviewed and revised the draft well enough.

That said, the amount of misunderstanding about it propagated by influencers is very disheartening. The hostility and arrogance displayed towards lawyers and legal expertise is in stark contrast to the usual humility the Rust community has towards technological expertise. I hope everyone do better.

I Am Not A Trademark Lawyer, if you are, I welcome your corrections. Keep caveats in mind, be critical but civil, let's discuss the concerns:

"I cannot even use Rust the word any more! How am I gonna write my blog article / book / presentation?"

That's called "nominative use", and is allowed by trademark laws, whatever the Rust policy says. Nominative use is allowed regardless if it's commercial or not.

"The Linux distro packagers cannot use the word Rust for their packages for the Rust toolchain any more!"

That was a concern back in June 2022, was fixed then, and the fix is inherited. Section 4.2.1 explicitly allows this non-nominative use.

"I cannot make any change to the Rust logo? What about my freedom of expression?"

You can freely use your creativity on the image of the Rust logo, as long as you do not use it to refer to Rust. In other words, you can totally publish your altered Rust logo as fan art, but you should not use it in a presentation to stand in for the official logo, or use it as the logo of something related. This "unaltered logo" clause is in effect for every trademark, including even the hexagon C++ logo. Python requires all alteration to be submitted for review, and publishes a guideline with permitted and not permitted examples.

"I have named my project Rust XXX, and I have to change it to something else? No other program language requires this!"

You don't have to change it, you just need to ask Rust Foundation for permission. Perl requires permission for such usage too. Python and Elixir have an exception for freely distributed products, but require permission otherwise too. "node" and "go" doesn't have this problem since their respective trademarks are "Node.js" and "Golang".

"I can't register rustmasters.com!"

You can, but the domain name usage prohibition is a mistake they should fix. Toyota USA v. Tabari (2010) has already decided that domain name can qualify for nominative fair use. All other policies mentioning domain name specifies prohibition only conditional on consumer confusion. Some comments say Rust is "going Oracle", but Rust has actually gone beyond Oracle here.

"I can't use Rust in the name of my user group?"

You can, and the draft policy is wrong again. This is almost certainly also a nominative use like in the domain name case, and Rust should change the unenforceable clauses. Python policy takes care to specify logo usage because logo usage is almost always non-nominative.

The policy draft does have serious issues, not because it can actually prohibit you from doing any reasonable thing, but because the things it tries to prohibit, it cannot. The Rust Trademark Working Group needs to improve their legal review process and not take the Model Trademark Guidelines at its words. I hope later revisions can fix the mistakes above and use more examples to illustrate nominative use and permitted non-nominative use.

#rust #rustlang #trademark #legal #law