Justin Cormack wrote:
On 22 Apr 2006, at 21:40, Ilmari Karonen wrote:
Without seeing any particular examples, my opinion would be that a gallery of past logos used to document the evolution of the visual identity of the company in question generally ought to be acceptable fair use.
*If* you are talking about the evolution of the company logo. *Not* if you are just talking about the company.
Do we have articles about the history of individual company logos? Not in these cases (yet). So not fair use. Just pretty copyvio pics.
An article about the historical logos used by a company would probably be a candidate for merging with the main article about the company. Such a merger does not generally affect the validity of fair use claims for images included in the merged content.
More generally, "pretty copyvio pics" sounds like a straw man argument to me. Who in their right mind would consider a company logo pretty? The sole reason for inclusing old logos in an article is that such logos *add information to the article*.
Of course, the article does need to discuss the logos to some extent, for the images to be relevant to the article. Like, say, noting the time period during which each logo was in use. If we have additional information on the logos, like for example who designed them, so much the better.
The reason I'm taking the time to argue this point is that I find this drive to eliminate eminently justifiable fair use content frankly absurd and also detrimental to the encyclopedia. If I read about the history of a company, I may very much like to know what their logo used to look like in the 50's, for example. The only reasonable way to convey this information is by including a picture of the logo.
Fundamentally, this is about what fair use really means. The law leaves its definition deliberately vague, relaying instead on the common sense notion that a use is "fair" if it serves a useful purpose and does not unduly harm the copyright holder. In this case, we're using these logos for the purpose of improving the coverage of a free encyclopedia, and we're not taking anything away from anyone by doing so.
Mind you, if anyone actually were to complain about us including their logos, we should immediately take them down. But until and unless it happens, it seems reasonable to me to assume that our use of company logos in an encyclopedic context, with proper attribution, is doing no actual or perceived harm to the copyright holders.