---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Mike Godwin mgodwin@wikimedia.org Date: Aug 25, 2007 11:09 AM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia logos on Commons To: Casey Brown cbrown1023.ml@gmail.com

I'd prefer, I think, for Wikimedia Foundation logos and visual trademarks to be removed from Commons. The potential for misunderstanding otherwise is pretty limitless.

None of us wants to be dealing with a case where someone used the Wikipedia icon on a product, when we challenged it, they said "Hey, it's FREE."

Of course, all trademarks are subject to fair use and other limitations on exclusive use, so we're not flatly forbidden reproduction of the iconography. We're just saying it's not "free" in the sense that content in Commons is supposed to be free.

--Mike

On Aug 25, 2007, at 11:03 AM, Casey Brown wrote:

Some guy nommed all the WMF logos on Commons for deletion because they were "not free" (Commons only accepts freely-licensed images). You can see the full convo in the Foundation-l archvies.

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Casey Brown cbrown1023.ml@gmail.com Date: Aug 25, 2007 11:02 AM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia logos on Commons To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org

Has anyone asked Mike's opinion on the discussion? Last I checked he was working on trademarks (and probably logos too). I'm sure he'd find this somewhat interesting.

On 8/25/07, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:

Brian wrote:

...

I think Erik really got to the heart of the issue. If this _were_ an

issue,

...

it boils down to the fact that you need to have legal protection of

certain

...

digital media that is somewhat stricter than your philosophy usually permits, and finding a way to tackle that problem in all open source projects is the place to do this, perhaps with a new type of license.

Well, the way the Debian project solved this is by [gasp!] just freely licensing their logo, as far as copyright goes, but retaining a trademark that they can use to prohibit misleading uses.

(They do also have a "this logo is for official Debian use only" logo, but it's not the common one that is usually associated with the project.)

See: http://www.debian.org/logos/

IMO this is a much better way of handling it without inviting obvious discussions about consistency.

-Mark

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