On 9/6/06, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
On 06/09/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Why?
This is answered on the Talk page.
The talk page suggests that anything restricted by trademark law is non-free. That would mean that pretty much every page about any product in any language Wikipedia is non-free, as the pages invariably mention the product name.
I'd say that's moved out of the realm of reasonableness.
Also to resolve the uneasy situation of especially German copyright law, which appears to consider many designs "PD-ineligible" which other countries would not. We have had many repetitive arguments about this issue and a clear policy statement should cut a lot of them down.
Are you sure this would resolve that situation? Are all of these designs registered trademarks?
Commons is global, and I don't think an image should be ineligible for commons simply because it is public domain in a single country. But that's just my opinion. If things are decided the opposite way I still don't see the big deal.
Lest this sound terribly anti-dewiki, it's not about trying to catch them out. It's about making our policies more in line with our ultimate aim, to provide freely usable media. If we're doling out trademarks, *regardless of their copyright status* we're not really achieving that.
I disagree strongly with that statement. Even if you restrict it severely to just registered trademarks, I still don't agree.
By this line of thinking do you also want to exclude all images of living people from the commons, because images of people are not completely free to use in any context. Just as you can't use someone else's trademark to sell a product, you can't use their photograph either. And some jurisdictions even extend this right to publicity after death. So we couldn't even keep pictures of some dead people on commons.
I suppose this is a slippery slope argument, but slippery slope arguments are pretty easy to defeat. Just explain why trademarked images are less free than images of living people, or modify your proposal to exclude images of living people from commons too.
And if your proposal, with that modification, is accepted, then I propose we start a Wikipedia Commons (note the "p") to put images which can be freely used in an encyclopedia, even if they can't be used on a bottle of dish detergent.
Anthony