On 9/6/06, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 06/09/06, Anthony <wikilegal(a)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