severity 829701 serious thanks this is still a legal issue On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Faidon Liambotis wrote: > On Wed, Jul 06, 2016 at 12:21:36PM +0200, Thorsten Glaser wrote: > > > Are there any other discussions about this where others agree with your > > > interpretation about this? #760306 is still waiting for a comment from > > > the ftp masters. > > > > Barring a comment from ftpmasters you should err on the safe side. > > So in the case of doubt and without any comment from ftp-masters, one > should ignore the opinion of their upstream, which includes the opinions > of a fully-staffed trained legal team of a free-software minded > organization such as the Wikimedia Foundation -- or, for that matter, > the intentions of the trademark holder which in this case is also a > free-culture minded organization (Creative Commons)? I wholeheartedly > disagree with that statement.
Exactly. I’m the previous Mediawiki maintainer, and I removed those files with a reason. I also talked to Mediawiki upstream, and they said they indeed do recognise this as problem and wanted to take it to their contact at CC. Do note that the status of CC as a “free-culture minded organization” is questionable considering they still promote nōn-free licences instead of renaming them to, say, “Restricted Commons” when they had the chance (i.e. for their 4.0 release). Independent of that, the trademark exists, and the terms for even just using the mark in question (such as the circled “CC”) are onerous and most certainly non-free. > Don't get me wrong -- I think it's good to raise those questions and > clarify licenses and challengfe the status quo, but I think it would > demonstrate arrogance to start stripping files like that or claim that > the CC logos are unfree. No, just correctness, plus it’s a regression against previous versions of Mediawiki packaging. > > Let me quote: > > You are authorized to use our trademarks subject to this Trademark > > Policy, and only on the further > > condition that you download images of the trademarks directly from our > > [35]website. You are not > > > > Your packaging of Mediawiki does not do that. Users of your packaging > > do not do that. That alone is grounds for unfreeness. > > Well, first of all, "freeness" and "free software" are terms that apply > to copyright law and licenses, as is the DFSG for that matter. There is > no such thing as a "free" or "non-free" trademark license — neither > Debian nor the FL/OSS community at large have made any such definitions. Independent of that, shipping the file as-is violates their trademark policy. > You /could/ argue that because of a trademark policy (e.g. that clause > above), Debian does not have the right to distribute the work and thus … precisely. > violates trademark law by doing so. That would apply to other entities > distributing those particular logos, such as, I dunno, everyone on the > Internet, including Debian via a bunch of other packages in the archive “Everyone uses Microsoft Windows.” The “everyone else is doing it” argument is so old it’s mouldy. And it s̲t̲i̲l̲l̲ does not work. > I don't interpret that clause like you do, but I'd be happy regardless > to raise this with Wikimedia's legal team. (I am a Wikimedia Foundation > staff member OK, please do so again and/or prod the people who already did so, see: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-mediawiki-devel/2013-June/002649.html >, although my comments here are not on behalf of the > Foundation and are done on my personal capacity as a Debian Developer > and interested user). Understood. > On the other bug report you mentioned that you were in contact with > someone from the Foundation's legal team. Could you perhaps let us know > who you were previously in contact with so that we can continue that > conversation rather than start it from the beginning? I’m not currently in contact with any MW/WM/WMF people, but the mailing list archive post I linked above contains both references to people and revisions (“I noted on r66559 its license as a problem”). HTH & HAND, //mirabilos -- tarent solutions GmbH Rochusstraße 2-4, D-53123 Bonn • http://www.tarent.de/ Tel: +49 228 54881-393 • Fax: +49 228 54881-235 HRB 5168 (AG Bonn) • USt-ID (VAT): DE122264941 Geschäftsführer: Dr. Stefan Barth, Kai Ebenrett, Boris Esser, Alexander Steeg
