On 8/19/07, Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
On 8/18/07, Florence Devouard Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
The content is public. Anyone can publish a book, or a DVD or a calendar or whatever, without having to ask any authorization to anyone. That's the point of the free license. As long as the license is respected, that is fine.
The logos (such as Wikipedia) are copyrighted by the Foundation. The names are trademarks. Some are registered in some countries, not all of them; but even non registered, there is something to consider. As such, any use of these (logo or name) must get the approval of the Foundation (or of a chapter, but let us keep things simple :-)). Ideally, the authorization should be given on a written document (contract). There are many reasons for this, which I will not detail here.
Not sure if this idea was already brought up, but how about a new logo, similar in style but different from the other wikimedia logos, that can be used without permission, under the condition that the majority of the contents (might need some legalese phrase here) originates in a wikimedia project?
So, if I want to make a lulu book from commons images, I can slap this "made with contents from wikimedia" logo on it. The logo thereby would be used to indicate the source, not to convey any kind of Foundation approval. Like "Made in Germany", which is often seen as an indicator of quality products ;-) without saying "this product was made by the German government".
The "made with" text could be part of the logo, or mandatory to print next to it. I have no idea what such a logo should look like, though. If we only had a mailing list that would be read by people who know how to make nice images... ;-)
We've also had this conversation on other lists... But the same thing comes back again and again. If the Foundation gives its approval on such a logo, isn't the Foundation officializing it in some kind of way?
I mean, it's a bit of the chhicken and the egg thing.
There is a community logo, that was neither approved, nor disapproved by the Foundation. The question always being... who takes the responsibility in the end?
In the Lulu.com case (or any other kind of publishing venture) thre must be a very clear position from the Foundation that says either:
1) yes, we might be publisher once 2) no, we will never ever in any way assume the role of publisher, however safe it can be (and images are much safer than text, for example), because it is not our role.
I would of course advise 2) and say that we need to work on the (dusty-but-often-talked-about[1]) trademark and logo policy that makes it VERY clear which logo can be used for what, when, and under what circumstances, with what implications. Unfortunately, this is still a "work in progress". :/
Still, I think your idea is worth a try, if we have a legal text which interpretation will be the same in as many law-frames as possible. Such as "this is NOT a publication of the WMF" ;-)
Delphine
[1]http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Logo_and_trademark_policy