Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
Putting something on a website is most certainly not
"Personal" use in
any legal system i know of.
It doesn't matter. This sort of thing goes to the very core of what
the freedom of speech is all about. We have a right to comment and
document on matters of a political nature, and our right to do so is
very much tied up in our abiity to reproduce small snippets of
content, such as this logo, to further that purpose.
There are at least two possible issues here:
1. Copyright in the logo -- this falls quite cleanly under fair use.
2. Trademark -- we are not using the logo as a trademark, but rather
as illustration of an article about the Bush campaign, which is symbolized
by the trademark.
And finally, it is worth taking some reasonable consideration of what
the legal risk could possibly be. It would be a political disaster of
such monumental proportions for the Bush/Cheney campaign to hassle the
beloved Wikipedia in such a baseless manner as any complaint about
this would be.
It is important not to violate copyrights or trademarks, but this is
not plausibly a violation. It is important to not take legal risks
that are too severe, even if there is a plausible argument that we are
right, but in this case, the nature of the parties (a political party
and a volunteer encyclopedia project) makes it virtually impossible
that we would even get the hint of a complaint about this.
--Jimbo