Red Hat sued Daniel Pocock for use of the domain name WeMakeFedora.org

A few days ago the news was released that Red Hat is suing Daniel Pocock for infringing in the "Fedora" trademark, under the use of the domain name WeMakeFedora.org, which criticized the contributors of Fedora and Red Hat.

Given this, representatives of Red Hat demanded that the domain rights be transferred to the company, since it violates the registered trademark, but the court sided with the defendant and ruled that the current owner retained the rights to the domain.

The court stated 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 subject of the site that publishes 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.

There are no advertisements on the Defendant's website. There is no evidence that the Defendant is a competitor of the Complainant, nor is there evidence that the Defendant operated the website for commercial purposes. The Panel rejects the Complainant's assertion, without supporting evidence, that the Respondent's conduct was likely to have been for commercial purposes.

The Panel finds that the Respondent is operating a genuine, non-commercial website from a domain name that contains an addendum (“we do”), which, as stated in the Response, is clearly an identifier of the contributors to the Complainant's website. . By registering the domain name using an addendum identifying Complainant's contributors, Defendant is not attempting to impersonate Complainant or misleading Internet users. Rather, Defendant is using the FEDORA trademark in the domain name to identify Complainant in order to operate a website that contains some criticism of Complainant. Such use is generally described as "fair use" of a trademark.

Consequently, the Panel determines that the Respondent has rights or legitimate interests in the domain name both because Complainant consented to Defendant's use of the domain name as long as the website followed Complainant's trademark guidelines and because Defendant is making a legitimate, non-commercial or fair use of the domain name, without the intent for commercial gain to mislead Internet users or tarnish Plaintiff's FEDORA trademark.

Daniel Pocock was previously the maintainer of Fedora and Debian. and maintainer of several packages, but as a result of the conflict he fell out with the community, started trolling some participants and posting criticism, mainly 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.

Red Hat tried to take over one of its sites under the guise of trademark infringement, but the court sided with Daniel.

Finally if you are interested in knowing a little more about it of the note, you can check the details In the following link.