* Brian Gupta <[email protected]> [2013-04-22 16:58]: > 1) Gnome foot is licensed under LGPL/GPL and is a registered > Trademark: (Pretty much all artwork including the foot is licensed > under Copyright law under LGPL/GPL).
GNOME actually has a good example of why it makes sense to license your logo freely and yet claim trademark rights. As Brian pointed out, copyright and trademark do different things: copyright is about modification (in this case) whereas trademark is about brand identity. While we can use a DFSG free license for the logo, we can use our trademark rights to make sure there is no confusion as to our brand. In reality (as you point out, Paul), this limits the ability to make changes to the logo as it would likely cause confusions around the brand. However, there are situations where this is not the case. GNOME has a really good example: someone took the GNOME logo and replaced the foot with a fish in order to use it for a fish-pedicure company. This is a valid use of copyright (their license allows modification) _and_ of trademark (there is no confusion between a piece of software and a fish-pedicure company, even if they use similar logos). See this LWN article for more information: LFCS 2012: Trademarks for free software projects https://lwn.net/Articles/491639/ It contains a copy of the GNOME-derived fish-pedicure logo. -- Martin Michlmayr http://www.cyrius.com/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
