[Clipart] Firefox trademarks

[Bryce Harrington]

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> Bryce Harrington <bryce at bryceharrington.com> writes:
> 
> > Yeah, logos and other trademarked items tend to have a lot of
> > conditions attached to them, and I wonder if it wouldn't be safer to
> > simply exclude all trademarked images.  I'd assume they're not
> > placed in the public domain anyway.
> 
> I agree that it would be safest to exclude images with significant
> trademark issues from the collection.
> 
> I have no idea whether Wilbur is a trademark.  He's a logo and a
> mascot, but I never investigated his legal status.  I've never been
> very clear on the FSF's stand on trademarks, though I think I have a
> fair idea what their stance on patents is.  I poked around on gimp.org
> and didn't find anything about this.  Unless someone knows, maybe we
> should ask.
> 
> Any image related in any way to Mozilla.org is almost surely
> trademarked, for historical reasons having to do with Netscape.

Regarding whether or not open source app logos are trademarked, I think
the BEST thing we can do for the community is to treat them as if they
were.  I think if we were to pick some app's logo and declare it Public
Domain, regardless of whether it was trademarked, could cause harm to
that project.  

Plus, the situation with non-trademarked logos is murky.  Unlike the
GPL, where the copyright is _explicity_ and unchangeable, with a
non-trademarked logo, we don't know for certain what the status is, nor
can we be absolutely certain that the trademark is "in progress" and
might show up later.

Thus for all these reasons together, I think a blanket "no logos and no
trademarked items" policy would be safest for everyone.

Bryce