Paddy brings up something very interesting with regard to the newspaper's use.
A coat of arms consists of two different things: the heraldic definition and the graphic representation. Typically, where a city has a copyright on its COA, it is only a graphic representation that the city or locality has copyrighted. A heraldic definition may be artistically interpreted, thereby circumventing the city's copyright on the COA. The legal definitions vary from country to country.
For instance, in the United States, the graphical representation that most states use as seals are the copyrighted property of the US state in question, and therefore are not considered free. However, a graphical representation of the seal may be used in its place as the "state seal".
This, of course, will not satisfy a good many of our end users, who will see anything but what the state/city uses, to the exact pixel, as "wrong", thereby eliminating its use at any project that disallows "fair use" images.
It also should be noted that an artistic representation of a COA is copyrightable, and therefore must be released prior to upload.
Cary Bass "Bastique"
From: "Zachary Harden" zscout370@hotmail.com Date: 2006/07/06 Thu AM 05:03:55 EDT To: commons-l@wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Commons-l] COA copyright policies and other legal stuff,..
Dear Paddy,
I just think it depends on the nations that the coat of arms are registered in. Some might have Public Domain status granted to them since Day One of use, while others have to sit through the test of time. While I am not familiar with Slovak law, I would wait and see what it says before we take any action.
Rgds, Zach
From: Patrick-Emil Zörner paddyez@yahoo.de Reply-To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List commons-l@wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List commons-l@wikimedia.org Subject: [Commons-l] COA copyright policies and other legal stuff,.. Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2006 09:01:00 +0200 (CEST)
Since Eric was posting a hint on all common admins talk pages I use this opportunity to talk about a subject I strongly feel about.
BTW I am subscribing to this ML and have been since the beginning. The reason I have not been reading the ML or making posts here is a completly differnt one.
When I was trying to go through the deletion tags to dispose images that are against the commons policy I found the following:
http://commons.wikimedia.org//wiki/Template%3ASlovakCityCOA
Concerning COAs my believe always was that we have to care about:
- Copyright(, Urheberrecht,...) whatever it may be in your country
- It must be commercial.
- People must be able to modify it.
To 1) in most cases we do not need to care about that dealing with COAs since they are ooooooooooold. However the points 2) and 3) make me feel uneasy and I know there was a long discussion on de WP.
Concerning point 2) some of you might know that the german newspaper "Die Zeit" was using the COA of the federal state and city Hamburg and needed to change the COA on the front cover because of a senat decision in Hamburg. Personally I think that such a behaviour is silly. I mean it is not like they have been printing toilet paper with the COA of Hamburg and selling the stuff. Even printing the COA of a town on t-shirts and selling them could cause legal trouble IMHO.
To 3) the Brockhaus Multimedial (a germen encyclopedia on DVD) uses stylised COAs. I totally do not get why they did that. What I am saying is that this could be interpreted as a modification plus commercial use. Modifing a COA and selling the stuff on some merchandising items could cause legal problems too IMHO.
Summary: I do not think that COA go 100% with wikimedia project policies concerning points 2 and 3. Personally I even think that COAs as a picture in an encyclopedia are nice to have but not necessary. But since they seem accepted in the Wikimedia projects commons should keep them all and without exception since they are PD with some legal framework attached to them. Therfore I suggest that in cases like the slovak COA we ignore the terms of use and leave it up to the one that uses these images to read the terms of use. The slovak terms of use do not even seem very strikt as far as I can understand the language.
Last but not least I think that the wikimedia projects had the wrong approach dealing with COAs. They should IMHO have waived using them. Only COAs that had 100% leagal permissions from the city/country should have been used. While the WM-projects were growing there could have been an open window to leagaly enforce WM-projects to use the COAs because the cities would have wanted us to use them because without saying the WM-projects make even the smallest town known in the internet.
What do you think?
greetings
Paddy
It might be a little bit more subtle than this. Actually things happen as if we had two copyrights :
1) the copyright on the design of the Coat of Arms 2) the copyright on the implementation of the Coat of Arms.
The question is mostly, "is 1) Free by our standards so that we can make our own free implementations of the coat of arms".
- A typical coat of arms is from the Middle Ages (say, the coat of arms of the city of Paris). There is probably no possible copyright on this (the notion of copyright did not exist), but there might be issues with trademarks.
- Then you might have more recent coats of arms, from times where copyright existed. I have had problem with people uploading coats of arms from Tolkien's universe. There, the design itself is clearly copyrighted.
-- Rama
On 7/7/06, bastique@bellsouth.net bastique@bellsouth.net wrote:
Paddy brings up something very interesting with regard to the newspaper's use.
A coat of arms consists of two different things: the heraldic definition and the graphic representation. Typically, where a city has a copyright on its COA, it is only a graphic representation that the city or locality has copyrighted. A heraldic definition may be artistically interpreted, thereby circumventing the city's copyright on the COA. The legal definitions vary from country to country.
For instance, in the United States, the graphical representation that most states use as seals are the copyrighted property of the US state in question, and therefore are not considered free. However, a graphical representation of the seal may be used in its place as the "state seal".
This, of course, will not satisfy a good many of our end users, who will see anything but what the state/city uses, to the exact pixel, as "wrong", thereby eliminating its use at any project that disallows "fair use" images.
It also should be noted that an artistic representation of a COA is copyrightable, and therefore must be released prior to upload.
Cary Bass "Bastique"
From: "Zachary Harden" zscout370@hotmail.com Date: 2006/07/06 Thu AM 05:03:55 EDT To: commons-l@wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Commons-l] COA copyright policies and other legal stuff,..
Dear Paddy,
I just think it depends on the nations that the coat of arms are
registered
in. Some might have Public Domain status granted to them since Day One of use, while others have to sit through the test of time. While I am not familiar with Slovak law, I would wait and see what it says before we take any action.
Rgds, Zach
From: Patrick-Emil Zörner paddyez@yahoo.de Reply-To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List commons-l@wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List commons-l@wikimedia.org Subject: [Commons-l] COA copyright policies and other legal stuff,.. Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2006 09:01:00 +0200 (CEST)
Since Eric was posting a hint on all common admins talk pages I use this opportunity to talk about a subject I strongly feel about.
BTW I am subscribing to this ML and have been since the beginning. The reason I have not been reading the ML or making posts here is a completly differnt one.
When I was trying to go through the deletion tags to dispose images that are against the commons policy I found the following:
http://commons.wikimedia.org//wiki/Template%3ASlovakCityCOA
Concerning COAs my believe always was that we have to care about:
- Copyright(, Urheberrecht,...) whatever it may be in your country
- It must be commercial.
- People must be able to modify it.
To 1) in most cases we do not need to care about that dealing with COAs since they are ooooooooooold. However the points 2) and 3) make me feel uneasy and I know there was a long discussion on de WP.
Concerning point 2) some of you might know that the german newspaper "Die Zeit" was using the COA of the federal state and city Hamburg and needed to change the COA on the front cover because of a senat decision in Hamburg. Personally I think that such a behaviour is silly. I mean it is not like they have been printing toilet paper with the COA of Hamburg and selling the stuff. Even printing the COA of a town on t-shirts and selling them could cause legal trouble IMHO.
To 3) the Brockhaus Multimedial (a germen encyclopedia on DVD) uses stylised COAs. I totally do not get why they did that. What I am saying is that this could be interpreted as a modification plus commercial use. Modifing a COA and selling the stuff on some merchandising items could cause legal problems too IMHO.
Summary: I do not think that COA go 100% with wikimedia project policies concerning points 2 and 3. Personally I even think that COAs as a picture in an encyclopedia are nice to have but not necessary. But since they seem accepted in the Wikimedia projects commons should keep them all and without exception since they are PD with some legal framework attached to them. Therfore I suggest that in cases like the slovak COA we ignore the terms of use and leave it up to the one that uses these images to read the terms of use. The slovak terms of use do not even seem very strikt as far as I can understand the language.
Last but not least I think that the wikimedia projects had the wrong approach dealing with COAs. They should IMHO have waived using them. Only COAs that had 100% leagal permissions from the city/country should have been used. While the WM-projects were growing there could have been an open window to leagaly enforce WM-projects to use the COAs because the cities would have wanted us to use them because without saying the WM-projects make even the smallest town known in the internet.
What do you think?
greetings
Paddy
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
On 7/9/06, Rama Rama ramaneko@gmail.com wrote:
- A typical coat of arms is from the Middle Ages (say, the coat of
arms of the city of Paris). There is probably no possible copyright on this (the notion of copyright did not exist), but there might be issues with trademarks.
Generally we don't concern ourselves with trademark issues, though.
-Matt
Generally we don't concern ourselves with trademark issues, though.
-Matt
Yes, we do. There's a strong bias against having trademarked logos on commons. This resulted from a lengthy discussion on this thread some months ago, and word from Jimbo.
-- Daniel
On 09/07/06, Daniel Kinzler daniel@brightbyte.de wrote:
Generally we don't concern ourselves with trademark issues, though.
-Matt
Yes, we do. There's a strong bias against having trademarked logos on commons. This resulted from a lengthy discussion on this thread some months ago, and word from Jimbo.
-- Daniel
I think this is one of many unresolved issues that continues to plague a standardised implementation of Commons policies. As I have said before, any guidance from the lawyer-folk would be welcome.
Brianna
On 7/9/06, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
I think this is one of many unresolved issues that continues to plague a standardised implementation of Commons policies. As I have said before, any guidance from the lawyer-folk would be welcome.
Lawyers hate giving legal advice, for good reason - they know the unreliability of the law and thus that advice, and are unwilling to make blanked proclamations about the legality or illegality of actions without talking only about specific cases.
It's not just a legal issue, though, but as much (if not more) a policy issue.
-Matt
On 7/9/06, Daniel Kinzler daniel@brightbyte.de wrote:
Generally we don't concern ourselves with trademark issues, though.
Yes, we do. There's a strong bias against having trademarked logos on commons. This resulted from a lengthy discussion on this thread some months ago, and word from Jimbo.
My recollection of that (maybe inaccurately) was that that came down to copyright issues, not trademark? A photograph or redrawing of a logo still infringes its copyright, after all. I don't remember any of the disputed logos being out of copyright.
I believe I am correct that Commons does not generally concern itself that the appearance of a trademarked element in a photographed scene may make a photograph unusable in some (but not all) commercial contexts, however.
-matt
To clarify: I'm not sure trademarks apply to coats of arms at all. The Paris Convention explicitly exempts at least national insignia from trademark protection (and, by extension, possibly from copyright).
Most countries have separate laws for protecting insignia from misuse - which we do indeed not concern ourselves with (see {{insignia}}), as long as the use on commons itself is legal, and it's possible to legally use them on some Wikimedia project.
My recollection of that (maybe inaccurately) was that that came down to copyright issues, not trademark? A photograph or redrawing of a logo still infringes its copyright, after all. I don't remember any of the disputed logos being out of copyright.
As far as I remember, we decided not to have any trademarked logos, copyrighted or not. Many logos could be considered PD because they are trivial - in fact, the German WP allows such logos, and is quite liberal with the interpretation... a dangerous course, IMHO.
I believe I am correct that Commons does not generally concern itself that the appearance of a trademarked element in a photographed scene may make a photograph unusable in some (but not all) commercial contexts, however.
Yes - logos appearing in a larger context are OK. Just *how* large that context must be is subject of interpretation... a street scene that contains some logos somewhere is probably ok. A picture showing nothing but a Coca Cola can? Not sure about that.
-- Daniel
Relevant thread from september 2005: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/2005-September/thread.html#103
On 7/9/06, Daniel Kinzler daniel@brightbyte.de wrote:
Yes - logos appearing in a larger context are OK. Just *how* large that context must be is subject of interpretation... a street scene that contains some logos somewhere is probably ok. A picture showing nothing but a Coca Cola can? Not sure about that.
Trademark, being a lot more context-dependent than copyright is except for fair use / fair dealing, makes things complicated here.
For example, many everyday objects have on them the trademarked logos of their creators. Sometimes very prominently. In addition, the shape of a designed object can be trademarked under some circumstances, and in addition can carry some copyright as well, in addition to such concepts as "design rights".
Thus, pretty much any photograph of a human-made object is not completely free - there are always things that could be protected, and in a world where people increasingly seek legal protection for things, this is going to come up more and more.
-Matt