On 2/24/09 4:06 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
The Iceweasel question is "Does it violate the
definition of free
software to permit logos released under licenses permitting only
restricted distribution?" Most people other than Debian would say no,
because 1) they're a tiny part of the software and easily removed, and
2) they're trademarked, so you couldn't use them for much even if they
weren't copyrighted. Wikimedia's logos (well, except the MediaWiki
one) are copyrighted with all rights reserved, so probably Wikimedia
disagrees with Debian on this.
The question that I asked, though, was "Do we want to use or
distributed copyrighted/trademarked logos *without* *any* *permission*
from the rights-holder?" We are *not* talking about a case where the
logo is licensed for people to use only restrictively. We're talking
about a case where the logo is not licensed at *all*. You can't just
go ahead and take a major corporation's logo and incorporate it into
your software without permission. Whether you use the GPL, BSD, MIT,
proprietary licenses, or whatever, that's just illegal, or at least
possibly so.
<IANAL>
My impression is that this is just as legal as referring to a company by
name -- it's not an infringement to use someone's trademark to *refer to
them*, whereas it is to *use the mark or something overly similar to
creation confusion and imply you are associated with the mark holder*.
However, I don't know just how true this is going to be of logos. :)
</IANAL>
-- brion