@sebas do you want to give it some thought?

Where are we with that?

I am thinking that trademark rules are already decided by law. It would be a matter of developing a process internally of identifying those groups in need of this protection and then running them through the regular trademark registration process in the country of choice.

Policy on using trademarks

An example text could be obtained from the GNOME Foundation, at https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/FoundationBoard/Resources/LicensingGuidelines?action=show . While this is largely a re-telling of what the general legal framework of trademarks is, it is a straightforward explanation with do's and don'ts. So a PR on the eV website adding such a policy (probably under "rules and policies") would be welcome.

KDE has a couple of registered trademarks; those are not mentioned anywhere that I can find, except in the footer of websites saying "is registered trademark of KDE e.V."

Policy on registering trademarks

This is kind of out-of-scope of the reason that we brought this up on -ev-membership now. We looked at registering KDE Plasma in 2021, and came to the conclusion that it wouldn't work, and it's expensive -- EUR 1000 per jurisdiction or so. Going with KDE (r) Plasma (tm) works, though, and doesn't require additional registrations.

Here is a possible template and a large list of open source related trademark policies: http://modeltrademarkguidelines.org/. This is for the policy on using trademarks which actually is quite a bit more than retelling the law. This is much more important than a policy on registering trademarks as we have many people and organizations using our trademarks every day, but the question on registering trademarks is quite rare.