Stephen Bain wrote:
But the thing with seals and stuff like that is that there are typically many versions made, which eventually go out of copyright. For Australia-relates things, for example, we use the now public domain 1912 version of the coat of arms, which still contains all the same elements (the shield, the wattle branches, the emu and the kangaroo) but is drawn differently.
These obsolete public-domain versions will be useful for various "decorative" uses, such as icons in navboxes or in userboxes or on WikiProject pages, but IMO it would still be perfectly appropriate to use the current copyrighted fair-use versions in the article on the state itself (or an article specifically on the coat of arms, if there is one) in the same way that we use company logos.