Hi all
Felipe Micaroni Lalli wrote:
I think the Wikimedia logos cannot to be on Commons. One exception open others exceptions. Maybe a photo of a person with a T-shirt with the Wikimedia logo...
I belive that is is not so much a question of where the logos are *hosted*, but where they can be *used*. Including non-free images from other sites in the wikipedia or the commons would violate the policy to have free content only (at least on projects that do not allow fair use). Worse, such images would not have a description page where copyright and trademark issues can be explained and discussed.
That is, if we have a strict policy, and the logos are not free, they cannot be used by the wikimedia projects, no matter where they are located. In that case, the images would no longer *be* our logos, because we can't use them...
For this reason, I belive calling fro a "technical solution" is pointles and will just shift the problem around one more time.
Ideally, the logos would be protected as trademarks, but under a free license copyright-wise. That, however, does not seem practical: trademarks have to be registered (and paid for!) in several countries, and they are much harder to defend than copyright. Also it has been argued that if the trademark owner releases the image under a free license, this could be interpreted by a court to overrule any restriction placed on the trademark, rendering it undefendable (does someone have a definite source on this?).
The only clean solution I see to this would be to have open content license address the issue of logos separately. A lot of open source projects have the same problem (debian, mozilla) - it seems just silly that is has not been addressed in a standard license. Maybe this will change in future versions of the GFDL and/or the CC licenses...
Regards, Daniel