[Clipart] incoming logos

Jonadab the Unsightly One jonadab at bright.net
Fri Feb 18 17:01:46 PST 2005


Jon Phillips <jon at rejon.org> writes:

> But if the images are Public Domain, then the copyright is clear on
> them. Thus, I sought out images which are PD and those are okay to
> make derivatives from, right?

Yeah, but trademark law is a separate issue from copyright law, at
least according to RMS (who, granted, has some extreme views), and
I've never heard an argument to the contrary that sounded clear and
informed to me.  So it seems to me, from what I know, that an item not
protected by copyright law may still be problematic for us if it
contains a trademark.

Tux is not, as far as I am aware, trademarked (though Larry Ewing's
copyright may be a concern, since the similarity between his Tux and
the ones in our collection is obviously not coincidental), and there
may be other logos that are not trademarked, so I don't know that we
have to exclude all logos.  The OCAL logo is not trademarked, and we
certainly intend to keep that I would imagine.

We obviously don't want to make trouble for ourselves by distributing
the trademarked logos of entities that are known to aggressively and
systematically pursue trademark violations (e.g., Disney), and would
have to take down any other trademark-problematic images upon request
from the trademark owner.  Beyond that, IANAL.

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