On Apr 23, 2006, at 6:23 AM, 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.
Most of what can be said can be said in the image captions. For instance, [[Wang Laboratories]]. Other articles have a specific section, such as [[Apple Computer#Logo]]
More generally, "pretty copyvio pics" sounds like a straw man argument to me. Who in their right mind would consider a company logo pretty?
Some company logos are indeed pretty.