Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com schrieb/wrote:
The core goal of Commons is maximal reuse.
Maximal reuse might result in minial content.
I think every restriction should be evaluated to determine whether the image is still "free enough".
With copyright, that's quite easy: Copyright restricts nearly every act of redistribution, so it makes sense to require that images and other media need to have a "free license".[1]
On the other hand, trademarks only restricts labelling products with the image or impersonating the owner, i.e. "trademarkish" use. IMO(!), that's still "free enough".
Further, there's a conflict if you include "trademarkish" use within the maximal reuse goal of Wikimedia: If someone really starts to use an image on Commons as a trademark, it's likely to become protected as a trademark (and incompatible with the maximal reuse goal).
Finally, there are some practical problems with a strict no-trademark policy. As everything can be trademarked, you would have to do regular trademark searches with every trademark registry. You can't ask the author/source of an image (especially if it's PD or depicts something found in nature) and there are very few things that can't be trademarked (and virtually none the upload of which to Commons makes sense).
Commercial logos are frequently under _both_ trademark _and_ copyright.
If it's also copyrighted (and not under a free license), the situation is clear: Wikimedia Commons can't host it.
------------------------------- [1] You can argue what constitudes a "free" license. Some people consider no modification licenses free enough, some consider copyleft/share-alike/GNU licenses too restrictive.
Claus