Linux maker Canonical has sent a takedown notice to the operator of fixubuntu.com, a month-old website that’s critical of the company’s privacy policies.
According to an email that Canonical sent to Micah Lee, the site’s operator, fixubuntu.com needs to come down because it uses Ubuntu’s logo and trademark. This could “lead to confusion or the misunderstanding that your website is associated with Canonical or Ubuntu,” the email read.
But Lee isn’t taking the thing down. In fact, as far as takedown targets go, Micah Lee may be the worst person Canonical could have picked on. He’s a staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online rights advocate. Lee reckons he runs into about a dozen digital rights lawyers at work every day. After consulting with one of them, he fired back a response saying the site would stay up.
The kind of non-commercial criticism that he’s doing with Fixubuntu.com is “completely covered under existing trademark law,” Lee says.
He adds that he would “happily take down the web site” if Canonical would turn off its ad features by default.
In an emailed statement, Canonical said, “To protect the Ubuntu brand, we need to ensure that wherever you see the Ubuntu logo, it’s an authentic part of the Ubuntu community.”
The editor of the Ubuntu news site, OMG! Ubuntu!, says that Canonical’s email to Fixubuntu.com “does make for uncomfortable reading,” but Joey-Elijah Sneddon believes that the company is trying to preserve its trademark rights, not silence critics. Although OMG! Ubuntu has been critical of the privacy issues, Canonical hasn’t sent him a nastygram. Were “Canonical really out to suppress criticism, they’d have given me a bit of a prod before now,” he said in an email interview.
There’s not much to Lee’s site. It hosts some Linux commands that eliminate some of Canonical’s ad-related features. “I just wanted a convenient place for me to remember what the command was to just turn everything off,” Lee tells us.
As a Linux maker, Canonical is a symbol of open source software. But Lee says that the kind of heavy-handed takedown request sent by the company runs contrary to the ethos of open source software. “Open source software is all about being happy about other people changing your stuff and releasing their own versions and releasing derivative works,” he says. “And this is sort of the opposite of that.”
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