On 6/12/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
David Newton wrote:
<snip: long detailed commentary>
It seems to me that it would be a good idea to get in touch with them over this matter and find out what their policy with respect to the Wikipedia is. It is nice to have good quality illustrations of the crests from the RAF Marham website, but even if they do turn out to be copyvios, we need to sort out the issues with respect to trademarks.
It seems to me that what something is used for is far more important in trademark law than in copyright law. Whatever might be said about copyright law in terms of a particular reproduction it can still be used without violating trademark law. In your material you quoted:
But any such use otherwise than in accordance with honest practices in industrial or commercial matters shall be treated as infringing the registered trade mark if the use without due cause takes unfair advantage of, or is detrimental to, the distinctive character or repute of the trade mark.
Unless we are using the material in direct competition with these units, or are creating confusion in the marketplace, or are pretending to be them, or are treating them unfairly in a manner that brings them into disrepute we come nowhere near to violating trademarks. Where and how do you perceive that we could be violating trademarks?
Copyright is a completely different manner.
Ec
The thing that worries me is the intertwining of copyright and trademark law in this case. It is not clear whether the additional restrictions on the logos, as compared with the rest, on the RAF Marham website are due to copyright law or to trademark law. The reply to my email to the RAF Marham webmaster in this case suggests to me that we are dealing with trademark law.
The reason I am concerned over trademarks is not the usage of the logos as they currently are: when they are used as infoboxes or otherwise as illustrations in serious articles about the units and formations concerned. What concerns me is that a vandal might link the image into an entirely different and dodgy article, and that it might be unnoticed. That would be skating perilously close to a violation of trademark law. It also applies to many other, equally or even more prominent, registered trademarks. What I would ideally like to be the case is to get a much more exact statement of what can be done with trademarks than is currently in place in the Wikipedia. Just as we have copyright tags for images, a couple of which do mention trademark law, I think it would probably be a good idea to have trademark tags, setting out the restrictions on what may be done with the image according to that law. We would obviously need two types of tag; registered and unregistered trademarks, and naturally this would have to be based on US law since that is where the servers are.
Another matter that I have searched the internet for is how trademarks interact with the GFDL. That explicitly says that images under that licence cannot be distributed in a more restricted way than with the licence. That would seem to mean that images of trademarks cannot be licensed under the GFDL, since trademark law places restrictions on their usage beyond those of the GFDL. The images in question from RAF Marham are not under the GFDL, but again it is something that needs to be considered.
I am not saying that the Wikipedia is breaking trademark law. The disclaimer does a pretty good job of mitigating that danger. What I am saying is that trademark law is a potentially dangerous minefield for the Wikipedia. I understand copyright law a good deal better than the average person since I have had to make a study of it in running a website, but I am not particularly familiar with trademark law beyond its most basic concepts (ie that a trademark must be defended, that it covers only certain fields unless it is very, very well known etc). I think something that is particularly dangerous, and under-explored, is the interaction of trademark law with virial licences like the GFDL, since they are worded in such a way that they could potentiall come into that area.
I hope I am being paranoid about trademarks on this occasion.
David Newton