On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 10:13 AM, Mike Godwin <mgodwin(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Mike, Of course we don't know - the only two ways of knowing is for Volvo to explicitly state this in a legally binding wording, or for it to be decided by a court. There have been similar decisions by courts, both overseas and in the US, and it is on that basis that we have a "PD-text" tag. In your earlier comment, which you have now snipped, you asserted that Sv.Wp was doing the wrong thing: "I hope no one thinks Swedish Wikipedians (or anyone else) is free to reuse the Volvo logo without a license." Do you now accept that it is quite possible that this logo could be appropriately tagged as PD and its use in Sv.Wp articles is congruent with their position about the removal of non-free WMF logos from articles? -- John Vandenberg

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 10:37 AM, Mike Godwin <mgodwin(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: It is tagged by Commons as PD. If you don't believe the PD justification is appropriate, or opens us up to legal disputes, then we need to spawn a separate discussion about PD-text. The Swedish Wikipedia has drawn a line in the sand that all content in article space should meet the definition of "free content".[http://freedomdefined.org/] The reason for using this criteria is so that there is not a need to consult a different license for each logo in order to determine what uses are acceptable. The availability of a WMF license for their logos is useful for some purposes, however the Wikimedia logos do not meet the criteria of free content. If Wp.Sv doesn't want to accept non-free licenses in article space, then it is understandable that the WMF logos need to go as well. -- John Vandenberg

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 5:10 PM, Mike Godwin <mgodwin(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Please stop using this example. You're living in California again; recall that the earth does crack open here at regular intervals. If you keep saying it enough it will come true, and then you'll be Prophet Mike, and we'll all be doomed. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 8:50 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro(a)gmail.com> wrote: Are you suggesting I don't remember my formative net years, Jussi? I'm far too young for Alzheimers, but old enough that the Morris Worm was a firsthand experience... I remember Mike from before the Law. Long before the Law. I know James Nicoll. I helped untangle Kent Paul Dolan's stunt with the speculative fiction newsgroups. .cabal and sci.physics.edward.teller.boom.boom.boom were a couple of my pranks... Yes, I murdered B-news. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 6:58 PM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb(a)gmail.com> wrote: Thank you for recognizing that there are no *known* scenarios in which the current use of Wikimedia-owned images would be a problem. I can't imagine any either. I also can't see any scenarios that lead to "a proliferation of individually crafted licenses for each case." This seems to be a phantom hazard. I haven't looked at the license in detail, but I take it for granted I'm pleased that you recognize that the problem is one with how you use words like "compatible" and "free." The problem is that you are applying imprecise notions of "compatible" and "free" that, in your mind, hint at something awful (dogs and cats living together?) without actually posing the risk of something awful. Of course it's not copyright. But the word "free" is not defined solely by copyright law, is it? They're protected by other areas of law too. I realize that a non-practitioner may suppose that different areas of intellectual-property law can and must be considered in analytical isolation from one another, but in the real world, as you may imagine, different areas of law intersect and interact all the time. Well, by all means, then, if some foreign language projects have adopted overly simplistic positions, we will increase the world's source of free knowledge by following their example, right? So what? We don't require that the WMF logos be used in some future Debian package, nor is it likely we will, absent a formal partnership of some sort (which seems unlikely). I wasn't reiterating a relationship. I was reiterating the fact that the uses in question are clearly and completely and nonrestrictively allowed by the copyright holder. That seems like an eminently rational approach -- far more "understandable" as I use that word. I have seen it for a quarter century. I don't think we serve freedom by reducing our understanding of free culture to the lowest-common-denominator, most simplistic, most un-nuanced, most legally unsophisticated notions of freedom. That is fanaticism for its own sake, and not at all a service to free culture. --Mike

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 1:16 PM, Mike Godwin <mgodwin(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: The general issue is non-free logos associated with links to other websites where it is clear that the logo is descriptive and useful, yada, yada. We *could* include many copyrighted logos in this way, if we were happy that the other party would not sue. For example, imagine Springer had a trademark policy like the WMF policy, granting liberal use of their logo in the same way. We could use this icon: http://www.springerlink.com/favicon.ico beside these links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:LinkSearch/springerlink.com This is a silly example for most of those links, as we would use doi's instead. In which case we could use the DOI logo if they had an acceptable trademark policy. http://www.doi.org/images/logo1.gif Repeat this for every logo which could be appropriately used, and we have a lot of non-free licensed logos in use, with individually crafted licenses that need to be reviewed for compliance on a regular basis. I am not using imprecise notions of free. I linked to freedomdefined.org and indirectly referenced the debian-legal criteria. non-practitioners often need to tackle each potential problem one by one. Slowly, the problems are resolved. The wikisource logo beside the wikisource link isn't increasing the world's source of free knowledge. It may help increase the use of wikisource. Sv.Wp being distributed as a Debian package is more likely to increase the world's consumption of that free knowledge. So you agree that a debian edition of en:template:wikisource would probably need to be different from the one used currently on English Wikipedia? My guess is that it would be an exercise in madness trying to create a "free" edition of English Wikipedia.(using freedomdefined.org or debian definitions of "free") Trying to keep it up to date would be sadistic. The "so what" is that Sv.Wp has made their "trunk" version of template:wikisource compatible with "free content" and able to be used in a debian edition without modification. However it is more complex. The result of this taken to the extreme is English Wikipedia, which is full of special cases which do threaten to make Wikipedia unusable for commercially purposes. freedomdefined, CC, debian, etc are hardly the lowest-common-denominator, most simplistic, etc. The benefits are uniformity and "compliance". WMF has decided to not use an existing "free" license. Neither did Debian for their 'official' logo ;-) http://www.debian.org/logos/ -- John Vandenberg

On 31 March 2010 04:28, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: So are you saying that a Wikipedia community is allowed to develop an EDP saying that _logos_ received from 3rd party owners under, say, CC-BY-ND [and possibly even -NC, but let's not get to the problems with that] are acceptable? I was told that this is not correct and the resolution allows only for EDP recognizing copyright limitations existing in national copyright laws (even though I do not see this in the resolution text). -- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]]