[Foundation-l] Wikimedia logos on Commons

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 8/23/07, SJ Klein <meta.sj at 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.