The Debian Project, the non-profit organization SPI (Software in the Public Interest) and Debian.ch, which represents Debian in Switzerland, they won a case of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) that involved a debian.community domain which hosted a blog criticizing the project and its contributors, as well as posting confidential discussions to the debian-private mailing list.
In contrast to the similar failed case presented by Red Hat on the domain WeMakeFedora.org, in which the Court held that according to the information published on the WeMakeFedora.org website, that the author's activity falls within the category of fair use of the mark, since the name Fedora is used by the defendant to identify the topic of the site that posts reviews of Red Hat.
The site itself is non-commercial and its author does not attempt to pass it off as the result of Red Hat activities or to mislead users.
In this new case debian.community claims confirmed and debian.community domain transferred to Debian project. Infringement of the Debian trademark is cited as the formal reason for the transfer of the domain. The author of the debian.community site announced that he has registered a new site, "suicide.fyi", to continue posting, where he will continue posting criticism of Debian.
The Defendant has no rights or legitimate interests with respect to the disputed domain name, the Defendant is a person who ceased to be a Debian developer in 2018. Your use of
DEBIAN trademarks are expressly prohibited by the Debian Trademark Policy version 2.0 (2013), which prohibits the use of the trademarks in a misleading or false manner or in a manner that discredits Debian, such as false advertising. That policy also prohibits the use of Debian trademarks without prior permission in any way that suggests affiliation with or endorsement by the Debian project or community, if the same is not true; use of a name that is confusingly similar to Debian trademarks; and use of the Debian trademark in a domain name, with or without commercial intent.There is no evidence that Respondent is using or preparing to use the disputed domain name in connection with any offering of goods or services. The Respondent has not been commonly known for the domain name in dispute…
Daniel Pocock has used the debian.community and WeMakeFedora.org domains to post reviews to contributors to the Debian, Fedora, and Red Hat projects. Such criticism caused discontent among the participants, as some perceived it as personal attacks.
In the case of the WeMakeFedora.org domain, the court found that the activity on the site falls under the category of fair use of the trademark, since the defendant uses the name Fedora to identify the subject of the site, and the site in it is not commercial and its author is not trying to pass it off as the work of Red Hat or mislead users.
Daniel Pocock was previously a maintainer of Fedora and Debian and maintained multiple packages, but as a result of the conflict, stood up to the community, started trolling to some participants and to publish criticism, mainly directed against the imposition of a code of conduct, interference in the community and promotion of various initiatives carried out by activists of the movement for social justice.
For example, Daniel tried to draw attention to the activities of Molly de Blanc, who, in his opinion, under the pretext of promoting a code of conduct, engaged in harassment of those who did not agree with his point of view and tried to of manipulating the behavior of community members (Molly is the author of an open letter against Stallman).
For his caustic comments, Daniel Pocock was banned from discussion platforms or excluded from the number of participants in projects such as Debian, Fedora, FSF Europe, Alpine Linux, and FOSDEM, but continued to attack their sites.
If you want to know more about it, you can consult the details in the following link.