[Clipart] Inclusion of copyrighted logo in your library

[Bryce Harrington]

On Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 07:56:58PM +0300, Jarno wrote:
> > This is the problem of public domain, Larry Ewing or anyone is never
> > going to make public domain their logos to prevent abuses like the
> > blender one. But if I need a Inkscape or Blender vector icon, I want
> > to be able of making it only one time. (GPL for logos?)
> 
> This is still same thing ... copyright holder must do it. And GPL lisences
> doesn't do better ... there is still away to abuse the artwork.

Careful, this is mixing up the difference between trademark and
copyright.

Logos can't be put into public domain due to _trademark_ issues, not
copyright.

In theory, you can create your own representations of a logo, but the
trademark for that work always remains with its owner.  The requirements
of how that logo can be represented varies from organization to
organization; some will be very strict that there are no images outside
their control that resemble the trademark at all.  Others will be more
allowing, and as long as you're using it to represent their product
properly, would be okay.  It's going to vary a lot from group to group,
and I think it'd be difficult to make any general rule that applies to
all trademarked images.

You may have seen that there are some efforts under way to enforce the
Linux trademark.  The reason here is simple: Unless they protect the
trademark, they will lose it, and then anyone could use the term 'Linux'
in relation to computer software without it needing to have any relation
to what we know of as Linux.
 
> I'm not sure are you the person that abused the blender logo but it's not
> even good advertise to use others logo. Peoples aren't so stupid. But
> lawyers can handel that ... trademark is trademark even if logo is in ocal
> but the person that put it into ocal can also be in charge.

I do think it's worthwhile to have collections of logos.  Oftentimes
people need these logos for legitimate reasons, and without a scalable
vector form they must resort to scaling a crappy bitmap version.  For
example, at OSDL the marketing folks often make presentations showing
the logos of our sponsors (for which we have special permission to use),
but they often send us logos that are the wrong size, wrong dpi, etc.,
and we have to scale them so they're all roughly the same size relative
to one another, but with bitmaps that turns out ugly.

You'll note that frequently companies provide their company branding
artwork (e.g. on their Press page), and provide the stipulations under
which you are allowed to use it.  If they don't, you can often write to
them to ask what the conditions are.  Companies put insane amounts of
money into creating and controlling their branding, so often have
staff on hand specifically to manage this, and it would be strongly in
their interest to work with the community to express the terms under
which their logos can be reused.

Anyway, I think this would be a worthwhile project, but it's outside the
scope of OCAL, and I think spinning off a separate project that can
focus on this would be the best solution.  (Coordinating a project like
this could also be a really good way to build your portfolio and/or
flesh out your resume, if you wish to build a career in branding.  Hint
hint.)

Bryce