Justin Cormack wrote: 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. -- Ilmari Karonen

Ilmari Karonen wrote: I agree with this approach. I would be surprised if there were many claims of copyright violation regarding logos unless the usage was clearly abusive. My understanding is that companies like Coca-Cola will pay to show people using their product in a movie. For them it's cheap advertising. For the most part I don't think that these companies are concerned at all about the copyrights on these logos. Trademarks would be another matter, but we have nothing to worry about there because we're not competing in their kind of business. It's also important to remember that works published before 1989 in the US had to have a copyright notice. Without that they were and continue to be in the public domain. Copyright then was not automatic. So I agree, in the absence of a complaint by the rightsholder including the logos should be perfectly safe. Ec

Justin Cormack wrote: In fact, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBS_idents> is a good example of how to write articles on things as trivial (?) as logos -- as with company's hisorical logos, explaining network idents over the years requires a sizable amount of fair use, and this article seems to do it well, since the images haven't swallowed up the article. There's also <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_television_idents>, but that article contains much less in the way of explanation, and might be harder to justify under [[WP:NOT]] and fair use. See also <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Film_and_television_logo_descriptions>. -- Minh Nguyen &lt;mxn(a)zoomtown.com&gt; AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn(a)myjabber.net; Blog: http://mxn.f2o.org/