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(a)hotmail.com>
Date: 2006/07/06 Thu AM 05:03:55 EDT
To: commons-l(a)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(a)yahoo.de>
Reply-To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List <commons-l(a)wikimedia.org>
To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List <commons-l(a)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:
1) Copyright(, Urheberrecht,...) whatever it may be in your country
2) It must be commercial.
3) 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