On 5/2/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
When each project has very limited fair use, pictures like logos or screenshots should not be an issue, Gerard. As I've argued before, there are going to be very, very few cases where a company will agree to license their logo under something like CC-ND. Imagine such a proposal being sent to Nike. "Dear Nike, we'd like to use your logo, could you please license it under Creative Commons No-Derivatives"? Corporate lawyers are all about risk minimization; seeing no benefit in such an arrangement, most of them would flat our reject the idea, I think.
The benefit would be that they get their logo in the Wikipedia article on Nike. For logos, though, companies would probably insist on some sort of "educational use only" restriction. CC-ND is just an example.
Of course, they'd only get that benefit if Wikipedia decided not to use their image if they didn't give permission. So there'd be a risk there, but personally I don't think the Nike article would be any worse without a picture of that swoosh.
The use of CC-ND for logos would actually be dangerous as it could prevent us from looking for a better solution.
How would it do that? And what better solution is available now?
I don't think there's any court in this world who would find copyright infringement if we add the logo of a company to an encyclopedia article.
I'd like to hear from some actual lawyers as to whether or not they think that's true. I find it to be an incredibly bold statement. There are lots of jurisdictions in the world, and it's my intuition that at least one of them must have some law against copying and distributing a copyrighted logo in an encyclopedia. But hey, I guess I could be wrong about that.
Our policies just need to allow making use of these exemptions to copyright law.
Erik
Absolutely. Whatever the "Free Content and Expression Definition" is, it should certainly include Wikipedia (i.e. the entire content of each article in the main namespace).
Anthony