Has anyone ever claimed that a gem name violated their trademark?

[Jared Beck]

Has anyone ever claimed that a gem name violated their trademark? If so, how did rubygems respond?

What would rubygems do if a gem author refused to rename their gem in response to an **alleged** trademark?

What assurances do I have as a gem author that I will be able to keep the gem name (the brand) I have chosen and worked to establish, in the above situation or any other situation you feel is relevant to discuss?

Where are these policies published?

Thanks for your hard work, and for taking the time to answer these difficult questions.
-Jared

[Jared Beck]

Has anyone ever claimed that a gem name violated their trademark? If so, how did rubygems respond?

If the gem author refused to rename their gem in response to the alleged trademark, what would rubygems do?

As a gem author, what assurances do I have that I'll be able to keep the gem name I have chosen, in the above situation, or any other situations you see fit to address?

Finally, where are these policies documented?

Thanks for all your hard work, and for taking the time to answer these difficult questions.
-Jared

[Nick Quaranto]

Jared-

In light of the situation going on with NPM right now these are all good questions to ask.

I just looked through our help site for relevant issues. From what I can find, we try to contact the gem owner and get them to remove the gem if possible in discussion with the person who is trying to gain access over a gem namespace. I don't see any issues in our help site where we forcibly removed access to a gem. Usually we can find a resolution with the author of the gem + who published it to RubyGems.org. We have had one DMCA takedown notice, which we published here: https://github.com/rubygems/dmca

We still don't have a Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Ownership Policy, or a Trademark Policy in general. It's been years since we started to discuss about one but no one has really pushed it through. Some public discussion of this, including a big thread on this list:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/rubygems-org/terms$20of$20service/rubygems-org/jixzTASyA6Q/_iFxxvd17-gJ

https://trello.com/c/P0ErDf2L/14-privacy-policy-terms-of-use

http://help.rubygems.org/discussions/problems/411-rubygemsorg-toseula

We do have draft versions of these policies, based on NPM's policies from mid-2015 (they're CC-licensed). We haven't published them or had any legal review of them yet.

Since people aren't paid to work on RG.org full-time (only recently paid at all thanks to RubyTogether) - this kind of work has fallen by the wayside. That's a pretty awful excuse though - and one I'm not proud of. I'll email the board at Ruby Central (the non-profit organization helps finance + run the site) to see how we can proceed here and get those policies published, and a solid answer about what we would do in a similar situation.

Thanks,

Nick

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[Jared Beck]

> I'll email the board at Ruby Central (the non-profit organization helps finance + run the site) to see how we can proceed here and get those policies published, and a solid answer about what we would do in a similar situation.

Thanks Nick. I look forward to reading these policies when they are published. I believe gem authors will want to see in these policies some assurance that the gem name they choose (aka. their brand) will not be arbitrarily taken from them. I fear that failure to provide such assurances may discourage FOSS development.