Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
If you want to issue press credentials there are strict steps to follow, and they have nothing to do with trademark law or whatever : they depend on national press legislations. Press organizations have special privileges related to press, but they also have special obligations to fulfill, and special liabilities !
So an organization cannot, without permission of government-sanctioned bodies, send people to observe and report on events? We're not talking about official government press passes here (the U.S. analog is state-issued passes), simply a piece of paper that indicates the person in question has the sanction of Wikinews to report on their behalf. People are free to ignore that piece of paper of course, and demand something government-issued, but are you saying that the mere act of issuing that piece of paper is illegal, even if it is not represented as an official government-sanctioned press pass?
I know in the U.S. at least this is perfect legal, and any attempt to /require/ press credentials be granted through a government agency would be explicitly unconstitutional (violating the First Amendment). A particular event can of course specify that they only accept state-issued press credentials for entry of journalists, or impose even more stringent requirements (White House press briefings require their own approval process), but that's a separate matter---nobody is expecting that Wikinewsies will be allowed in /everywhere/ that other journalists are, at least not in the near future.
-Mark