Board Decision: Membership Benefits: Brand / trademark usage in Ads (Social Media, Search Engines)

Proposed at: 26 June 2024
Decision owner: Boris Hinzer
Decision status: ✅ Accepted, with 5 yes

Attendance and voting

Board Member	Attendance	Vote
Olivier Dobberkau
Stefan Busemann	In meeting	✅ Yes
Boris Hinzer	Remote	✅ Yes
Rachel Foucard	Remote	✅ Yes
Susi Moog
Tymoteusz Motylewski	Remote	✅ Yes
Thomas Maroschik	Remote	✅ Yes

Decision description

Facts/Problem

General information: To make our memberships more attractive, the decision owner would like to introduce real benefits for different membership levels.

Proposed benefit:

We will explicitly allow only members of a certain tier upwards to use the TYPO3 brand in online ads, such as Google Ads or any kind of social media ads.

Proposed memberships:

Agency: Silver, Gold, Platinum
Academic: Silver, Gold (but only for jobs)

Additional:

The TYPO3 GmbH also wants to have this for Solution Partners (and would cover their membership fees in case someone doesn't have one).
We could start collecting trademark infringements from others (via a form on our website with the most common search engines, social media platforms and screenshots) at some point. This would ease the work for Ric van Westreenen.

Objective

Making our memberships more interesting.
Free rider agencies will be forced to sign up for a membership of at least Silver level.
According to Ric van Westreenen, this would strengthen our trademark.

Obligations to cooperate

Ric van Westreenen, for monitoring the ad usages manually in the beginning.
Later on Google (and presumably others as well), which automatically refuse ads with trademark usage of "TYPO3".
Low tier memberships and "free riders".

Financial and human resources impacts

Maybe slightly more reimbursement money for Ric van Westreenen, as he needs to file the complaints with Google, etc. first.
Ric van Westreenen already agreed to perform the tasks.

Resolution/Petitum

Shall we allow the usage of our "TYPO3" trademark only for Agency members, starting at Silver level and above?
Shall we allow the usage of our "TYPO3" trademark only for Academic members, starting at Silver level and above (for job advertisements)?
Shall we allow the usage of our "TYPO3" trademark also for TYPO3 GmbH Solution Partners (given that the GmbH covers the Silver membership in case they are no member)?