Announcing Our First Trademark Policy

Today we are publishing The Matrix.org Foundation’s first trademark policy. As a foundation we believe that everyone should have control over their own communications and that secure communication should be available to everyone as a free and open standard. We exist to act as a neutral custodian for the Matrix protocol and to ensure that it operates as an unfragmented standard, which benefits the whole ecosystem. If the Matrix ecosystem is thriving everyone benefits, from people using Matrix for their daily conversations to companies building products on Matrix.

A big part of our work as custodians is ensuring that there is clarity in sources of information and services, in which trademark protection plays a big role. Our aim with this trademark policy is to help people understand if a product claiming to be compatible with the protocol is actually compatible, and if a specific product or service is officially supported by the Foundation.

The aim of this policy is to ensure that there is clarity on which projects are endorsed by or affiliated to the Foundation. However, it is not meant to stop projects from announcing their compatibility with the Matrix specification or even using the word “matrix” in their naming. For example, projects like matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (MDAD) or matrix-authentication-service (MAS) are not official Foundation projects, nor do they claim to be. On the other hand, if a project were to name itself matrix-official-authentication-service that would be in clear violation of this policy.

Our assumptions are always from a place of good faith and assuming everyone is working towards the improvement of Matrix. This is why the policy is as relaxed and permissive as it is – we encourage everyone to build on Matrix and contribute in any way they can. To ensure our trademark protects projects that genuinely contribute to the Matrix ecosystem, we will monitor more closely those abusing it. To be clear and summarise, you will still be able to use the Foundation’s trademarks to:

• Refer to the Foundation and/or to explain how your software is compatible with the official Matrix specification;
• Promote social and small non-profit events, as long as you make it clear they are not officially endorsed or run by the Foundation;
• Describe social media accounts, pages, or communities, provided there is no form of misleading users about affiliation with the Foundation.

There are certain circumstances where we expect you to seek explicit approval from the Foundation before using our trademarks, which we detail in section 3 of the policy. Additionally, we are launching a brand guidelines area on our website to help you navigate this new policy and continue to use the Foundation’s trademarks in an appropriate way.

We also need to make it clear that this policy is exclusively about the Matrix.org Foundation’s trademarks, registered in the UK and the US, with further protection in Canada and the EU. It is not about open source licenses or any other form of licensing. You need to ensure your projects comply with this policy and also with any relevant licensing terms – this is not something we can offer legal advice on.

Finally, like we with all of our policy documents, we are always open to feedback and ways to improve. If you think there are ways we can improve this policy feel free to reach out to legal@matrix.org. Whilst we won’t create individual exceptions, if there are suggestions being made that would benefit the entire ecosystem we will consider them and include them in further iterations of the policy.