[Clipart] incoming logos

[Bryce Harrington]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 11:00:42AM +0100, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
> Just to clarify, these logos are not copyrighted (by others) as they are
> the original work of the submitters who can legally put them in the PD.
> They do however depict trademarked images, which is a problem. (Which is
> the same reason we said no to some early submissions of some Star Trek
> flags to the flag collection).
> 
> Some logos are ok to display though, even if they are trademarked. Linus
> have for instance given permission for use of the Linux trademark (don't
> think tux is trademarked though). I think the same goes for the firefox
> logo.

On this one I checked with OSDL's lawyer (who is involved in the
copyright/trademark verifications of these), and got a written
confirmation that it can be used in OCAL as PD.

For the Firefox logo, be careful; I had heard from someone (Andy?) that
they were particular about unauthorized re-creations of it.

In general, I don't think we can make a generality about acceptance of
trademarked logos for open source projects, and will need to treat each
on a case-by-case basis.  I'm guessing we'd probably need to be careful
to document each case where we have permission, and for now block
acceptance of any trademarked image that we don't have confirmed
permission for.

> I remember some noise about this some time ago where Slashdot got some
> heavy breathing from IBM over the use of the IBM logo on the Slashdot
> website. It was quickly defused by IBM employed Slashdot readers making
> noise about it in-house. 
> 
> I read this article on use of trademarks:
> http://www.publaw.com/fairusetrade.html
> 
> And I have mailed the laywer who wrote it asking for advice, I let you
> know what he replies if he replies. Of course the normal 'this reply is
> not legal advice' disclaimer applies to  whatever he responds.

Cool, yes legal advice would help us out a lot here.  If we can have
some correct guidelines about what we can/can't do regarding trademarked
images, that'd help a lot. 

Bryce