I know this has come up some more times, but this time somebody actually filed a deletion request about all Wikimedia logos, see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Copyright_by_Wikimedia.
Note that the nomination is correct by the letter, so unless the foundation changes the licensing policy, we will have to delete the images. Nobody wants them deleted, so I would ask the board to clarify on this issue.
Bryan
On 8/23/07, Bryan Tong Minh bryan.tongminh@gmail.com wrote:
I know this has come up some more times, but this time somebody actually filed a deletion request about all Wikimedia logos, see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Copyright_by_Wikimedia.
Note that the nomination is correct by the letter, so unless the foundation changes the licensing policy, we will have to delete the images. Nobody wants them deleted, so I would ask the board to clarify on this issue.
Staff/foundation folks should also look at the images listed before commenting.
For the true Foundation logos. It would be best to remove them from commons, and make them accessible from the skins... but thats not really technically feasible to achieve without a lot of needless work, so they should say. ... and for these images I think that the nominator is being intentionally and needlessly disruptive.
A number of these images, however, are not official foundation logos and I expect the foundation would not and should not approve of them.
On 8/23/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
For the true Foundation logos. It would be best to remove them from commons, and make them accessible from the skins...
I hacked a MediaWiki option $wgAllowExternalImagesFrom a while ago that makes it possible to use MediaWiki's URL-to-image translation with a defined basepath URL. So it would theoretically at least be easy to allow basic image usage by putting the logos in a protected path somewhere and referencing them as URLs. That limits the usage possibilities though.
Personally I feel that the real answer is to figure out what "free/libre" truly means in the context of identifying works such as logos. I don't believe existing free content licenses are appropriate for such works. The main purpose of a logo is to identify something. To "liberate" it in the sense of permitting completely unrestricted use is to render it useless. But perhaps "liberation" here should mean something different.
For example: - a free/libre logo could be one which can be used in a list of defined scenarios without permission. - a free/libre logo could be one which always has a corresponding, freely licensed "community" logo (Debian style). - a free/libre logo could be one which makes the frictionless model of "don't ask for permission but respect requests for removal" explicit.
The problem is not unique to us, and conflicts over the meaning of freedom in the context of trademarks/logos have led to counterproductive infighting in the free culture movement (such as the renaming of Firefox to Iceweasel in Debian GNU/Linux for trademark reasons).
To me, it sounds like a job for a workgroup of interested people who would bring both a legal and an ethical perspective to the subject. Is anyone interested in pursuing this line of reasoning further?
On Fri, 24 Aug 2007, Erik Moeller wrote:
Personally I feel that the real answer is to figure out what "free/libre" truly means in the context of identifying works such as logos. I don't believe existing free content licenses are appropriate for such works. The main purpose of a logo is to identify something. To "liberate" it in the sense of permitting completely unrestricted use is to render it useless. But perhaps "liberation" here should mean something different.
Copyright and trademark are distinct. I don't know of a reason to impose copyright restrictions on logos. You still retain the right to protect the use of the logo in a way that might be confusing (with respect to identifying something).
It should be possible in a copyright sense to use an image in a variety of ways as long as the result isn't confusing in the trademark sense.
For example:
- a free/libre logo could be one which can be used in a list of
defined scenarios without permission.
- a free/libre logo could be one which makes the frictionless model of
"don't ask for permission but respect requests for removal" explicit.
A combination of these two would be great. Clear permission scenarios, and some fuzzy ones in which the 'dont ask but respect requests' kicks in.
- a free/libre logo could be one which always has a corresponding,
freely licensed "community" logo (Debian style).
This would be a mistake. Who in the Debian community thinks this was a good idea? Nowadays noone uses the non-community logo.
To me, it sounds like a job for a workgroup of interested people who would bring both a legal and an ethical perspective to the subject. Is anyone interested in pursuing this line of reasoning further?
Yes.
SJ
On 8/23/07, SJ Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
Copyright and trademark are distinct. I don't know of a reason to impose copyright restrictions on logos. You still retain the right to protect the use of the logo in a way that might be confusing (with respect to identifying something).
+1 +1 +1 +1.
- a free/libre logo could be one which always has a corresponding,
freely licensed "community" logo (Debian style).
This would be a mistake. Who in the Debian community thinks this was a good idea? Nowadays noone uses the non-community logo.
I mostly agree.
People want to use the logo because it looks official. So either the community logo out competes the official (bad), or people won't want to use it (pointless).
In many cases the places where I've the users really interested in using derivative logos they are trying to make something look more official looking than it actually is... For example, the CVU ("counter vandalism unit") using the Wikimedia Foundation logo.
In cases where the actual desires conflict, (groups wanting to wear official badges, foundation, wisely, unwilling to give official status to questionable projects) there is no solution which will make people happy.
I agree that we should permit the use of logos in Wikipedia articles. Thats why I support the policies which allow limited fair use images.. Logos and the like clearly fit inside of that. As a result I don't think we need to do anything else.
Erik, I understand that you're unhappy with Dewp's decisions about these matters ... but their position is a long standing one. It's not right of us to subvert their choices by redefining free licenses in order to get content they have rejected into commons from where they can't currently refuse it.
As far as the WMF logos go, I don't see anything wrong with keeping them in commons for technical reasons.. If we can actually take them out and still have scaling and the like, then we should do it. I wasn't aware that we were able to do that already. The deletion debate is just a crazy violation of WP:POINT, ... a policy we obviously need to copy to commons now.
If you think it makes sense to build a repository of non-free images for things like logos which are widely used on many projects, then I wouldn't oppose doing such a thing... but such content should stay out of commons.
On 8/24/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
I agree that we should permit the use of logos in Wikipedia articles. Thats why I support the policies which allow limited fair use images.. Logos and the like clearly fit inside of that. As a result I don't think we need to do anything else.
Erik, I understand that you're unhappy with Dewp's decisions about these matters ... but their position is a long standing one.
1) My post has nothing to do with de.wp - please do not attribute false motives.
2) de.wp does permit non-free logos, under the assumption that they are "public domain" due to insufficient creativity, an assumption which they base on a German court ruling. They apply this logic even to US logos, e.g. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_Century_Fox ; this is problematic and WMF is aware of it.
3) We are talking about a specific class of works: identifying works. I think it is perfectly reasonable to try to come up with a standard of freedom for such works, and to then open up our archives to allow uploading of those works which meet this standard to a central archive. Whether that archive should or shouldn't be Commons and whether one should use the vocabulary of the free culture movement for those logos is open to debate.
Hoi, The problem has been identified many times; a logo is part of a trademark and consequently an organisation is limited in what it can allow to be done with the materials that make up their trademark.
It is a general problem not restricted to the Wikimedia Foundation or Debian. Based on the notion of "fair use" it is possible to use logos in many Wikipedias. Based on the notion of "insufficient creativity" there is another creative solution to the same problem. The issue is that Commons does not allow fair use and the "insufficient creativity" notion is also considered to be problematic.
What is needed is the acceptance that logos instil specific restrictions. These restrictions will not go away. What these restrictions do is limit the freedoms associated with this material. In essence they prohibit you from using it to represent the organisation whose trademarked material it is.
Given what the purpose of a logo is and given why we want to use these logos in the first place, this is reasonable. It is for this reason that we need something like a CC-tm license. A license that is considered free but restricts what is implied by being part of a trademark.
Thanks, GerardM
On 8/24/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 8/24/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
I agree that we should permit the use of logos in Wikipedia articles. Thats why I support the policies which allow limited fair use images.. Logos and the like clearly fit inside of that. As a result I don't think we need to do anything else.
Erik, I understand that you're unhappy with Dewp's decisions about these matters ... but their position is a long standing one.
- My post has nothing to do with de.wp - please do not attribute false
motives.
- de.wp does permit non-free logos, under the assumption that they
are "public domain" due to insufficient creativity, an assumption which they base on a German court ruling. They apply this logic even to US logos, e.g. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_Century_Fox ; this is problematic and WMF is aware of it.
- We are talking about a specific class of works: identifying works.
I think it is perfectly reasonable to try to come up with a standard of freedom for such works, and to then open up our archives to allow uploading of those works which meet this standard to a central archive. Whether that archive should or shouldn't be Commons and whether one should use the vocabulary of the free culture movement for those logos is open to debate.
-- Toward Peace, Love & Progress: Erik
DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On 8/24/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
- de.wp does permit non-free logos, under the assumption that they
are "public domain" due to insufficient creativity
We also do partially, but only if the logo is deemed public domain in the country of origin.
Bryan
I am a little bit resignated about the whole of this issue and I have to say few words about it.
- Personally, I am at the line of de.wiki decision: I would always vote for leaving all non free content, including logos. Yes, we are enough powerful to dictate what is possible to treat as free and what is not. (The best solution in that course is to move all WMF trademarked logos to meta.wiki or to WMF site. This is one of the examples where we and WMF should be fair enough and say if something is not applied for others, it should be applied to us, too.)
- However, I completely support creation of nonfree.wikimedia.org repository. Because it is the only solution which is according to the Board resolution. If Board said the same as de.wiki, then such proposition would be meaningless.
From 1999 up to the last year I spent a lot of time while trying to
bring free licenses in Serbia. At April (or May) of 2006 I finally find a lawyer who were willing to work on introducing CC licenses into the Serbian law system (actually, she found me). With her colleague from the Institute for Law (I think that this is the name), we had two best creative copyright lawyers from Serbia.
And the story related to one of the subjects of this thread begins here.
Unlike a lot of other projects with similar size (of number of contributors and articles), projects in Serbian language had the best possible lawyer support (for one country of something more then 7 millions of inhabitants).
But it wasn't enough.
To deal with any kind of copyright problems which are not so obvious, I had to spend hours of talks with them without *any* conclusion because it was simply not possible to do anything.
Then I realized that the best thing is not to do anything except if WM Serbia is explicitly in danger. (Thanks to good circumstances, nothing was happened.) And, of course, to leave her to finish CC localization.
So, let's summarize: - Serbian language projects are relatively small. - Unlikely the most other projects of similar size, it has supporting local chapter. - Unlikely the most other projects of similar size, it has good lawyers. - Unlikely the most other projects of similar size, it had at least three persons (one of others is a doctor of mathematics from Princeton; the second one is an important member of the community who is working in a municipal court) from the community who hardly worked on copyright issues with relevant lawyers. - We worked on this issue for at least 6 months. - And we did nothing. (Yes, we did categorization of images and similar project related things, but we did nothing in relation to possible usage or prohibited usage by Serbian laws.) For example, Serbian (and Montenegrin) fair use is much more permissive then US (in general it stays: "Use it while your usage is reasonable").
And when the Board resolution came, we had a serious problem: I didn't want to take care about copyrighted works and the most interested person in free use issue is living in USA.
So, even we had much more possibilities to deal with fair use on Serbian language projects then the most of other language projects (actually, all except English, French, German, Italian and Polish), we simply were not able to deal with fair use problem.
De.wiki decided not to keep non free images; en.wiki decided to keep. The most predictable decision of sr.wiki would be to keep fair use image (I would vote against, but it was not a dominant opinion). How much other projects voted about this issue? And how much of them simply realized that they are not able to deal with law issues and didn't want to vote?
At the end, the only conclusion is that it is possible to have something only if your project is big enough to keep this. And I think that this is very problematic situation for Wikimedian aims.
BTW, I completely understand Board's decision. While I would insist not to make half-decision, it is completely reasonable to say: OK, we don't support this, but if you are willing to do such things, you have to take care about it. However, such decision is unfair toward small projects.
And about nonfree.wikimedia: Of course, it shouldn't be a place for every free use image. It should something like Debian's non-free repository (there is no even Adobe Acrobat there). And policy on en.wiki seems to me very reasonable as a basis of nonfree.wikimedia project.
On 8/24/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 8/24/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
I agree that we should permit the use of logos in Wikipedia articles. Thats why I support the policies which allow limited fair use images.. Logos and the like clearly fit inside of that. As a result I don't think we need to do anything else.
Erik, I understand that you're unhappy with Dewp's decisions about these matters ... but their position is a long standing one.
My post has nothing to do with de.wp - please do not attribute false motives.
de.wp does permit non-free logos, under the assumption that they
are "public domain" due to insufficient creativity, an assumption which they base on a German court ruling. They apply this logic even to US logos, e.g. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_Century_Fox ; this is problematic and WMF is aware of it.
- We are talking about a specific class of works: identifying works.
I think it is perfectly reasonable to try to come up with a standard of freedom for such works, and to then open up our archives to allow uploading of those works which meet this standard to a central archive. Whether that archive should or shouldn't be Commons and whether one should use the vocabulary of the free culture movement for those logos is open to debate.
-- Toward Peace, Love & Progress: Erik
DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
SJ Klein wrote:
On Fri, 24 Aug 2007, Erik Moeller wrote:
- a free/libre logo could be one which always has a corresponding,
freely licensed "community" logo (Debian style).
This would be a mistake. Who in the Debian community thinks this was a good idea? Nowadays noone uses the non-community logo.
The community logo (swirl) was already much more used than the non-community logo (swirl with bottle) at the time the licensing decision was made, so this isn't some sort of unexpected outcome: it's what was intended. The main, visible, commonly used logo of the Debian project is community licensed, so as to be as free as possible, and of course continues to be the most commonly used one. A lesser-used "This Is Really Really Official" logo is retained for a handful of uses that need such a thing, but it was never widely used and I don't think anyone expected it to become widely used.
Contrary to your implication, I haven't noticed any widespread opinion in the Debian community that this was a mistake; to the contrary, this course of action received a strong vote in favor.
-Mark
On 23/08/07, Bryan Tong Minh bryan.tongminh@gmail.com wrote:
I know this has come up some more times, but this time somebody actually filed a deletion request about all Wikimedia logos, see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Copyright_by_Wikimedia. Note that the nomination is correct by the letter, so unless the foundation changes the licensing policy, we will have to delete the images. Nobody wants them deleted, so I would ask the board to clarify on this issue.
This is a canonical case of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:POINT - you even say yourself you don't want the outcome you're asking for.
- d.
On 8/24/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
This is a canonical case of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:POINT - you even say yourself you don't want the outcome you're asking for.
Don't blame me for bringing this to your attention. I did not initiate the request.
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org