[WikiEN-l] FBI vs. Wikipedia

[Carcharoth]

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 4:00 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:

> The FBI Seal / Badge issue is a pretty good example of why we actually
> need Mike's opinion to limit the risk posed by the overly cautious or the
> overly incautious.

Possibly. In this case it might be simpler. The first question to ask
when assessing any image is whether it is genuine. In this case, I
really would like to see an *official* FBI site that confirms this is
what an FBI badge looks like. I'm not sure if any official sites do
actually have such images, so that might be a problem considering the
numbers of replicas around.

http://www.ehow.com/about_5614599_fbi-badge-look-like_.html

Maybe "badgepolicecom" on youtube is a reliable source?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlK08uYlg48

http://badge-police.com/

They are "official and licensed reseller partner of
bellingham&carrington police badges" apparently, so their images would
be genuine. But I doubt they would release their images under a free
license. You would have to find someone who could confirm that they
had access to an official badge (or historical badge) and were willing
to release their photograph under a free license (the badge itself is
PD, but as a 3D object photographs of it are not PD so the
photographer still needs to release his work under a free license).

Oh wait, I found a page here:

http://www.fbi.gov/priorities/priorities.htm

That would be a better source for images, but the images don't seem to be there.

I tried searching the FBI site for "badge", and found stuff about
people being arrested and tried for selling badges:

http://sandiego.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel10/sd021710.htm
http://newyork.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel08/credentialfraud070108.htm
http://houston.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel10/ho020510.htm

There should be an official page somewhere with an image for people
wanting to know what an FBI badge looks like so they can identify
people using fraudulent badges, but I can't find such a page.

Please note this is about images of the *badges* not images of the
*seal* (equivalent to a logo). The 3D versus 2D stuff makes a
difference here (in the US at least), so you need explicit permission
from the *photographer* to use the image.

Carcharoth