From: "Theodore H. Smith" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Why not put up a call for Unicode logos? Instead of asking for an > inhouse one to be made, I'm sure you'd get more logos offered than you > could know what to do with. At the worst, you could have a design to > learn from. > > Some of my logos were made with suggestions from other people. I did > the work, I did most of the design, but important elements came by > other people's ideas. This way I own what I do and it is "in house", > but still I am open to external improvement. > > Hey, if you can give me a tiff of the "Unicode" word (in it's large > original format) which is the part that I actually did like, I could > re-do the rest for you in PhotoShop v6 format, and submit as a > suggestion.
In my humble opinion, I do think that the unique design of the "UNI" ligature in the Unicode official logo is already copyrighted, and thus any logo that would be created with it would require an authorization from Unicode before being published. So any other logo that would be proposed should use this unique typographic ligature as a sign of recognition, and Unicode could mandate that any use of this ligature requires linking it to its website and nothing else. This would leave some space for creation of more appealing logos or buttons for use on websites. Another question is: can such a derived logo be created which uses the same official colors of the main Unicode logo? The proposed buttons do not match completely with the official logo by its colors, and layout and content. The only common thing is the "UNi" ligature, and the textual name (both of which are copyrighted and protected against illegitimate claims by others)... This copyright is enough to allow reproducing it on websites only with the fair terms given in the logos page, only as a way to insert a graphic link to the official Unicode website (http://www.unicode.org/), but any author of a derived graphic that would use the "Unicode" name or the unique "UNi" ligature cannot claim anything if this creation is published without the prior authorization of Unicode who owns the copyrights. So these creations are implicitly donated to Unicode without possible claims. Then Unicode could reuse these creations only if the original author explicitly endorses the risks associated to other possible copyright claims related to other parts of the logo creation. Unicode would then be free to use or not use them on its logos page, and could use a "prepublishing" phase where usage on other websites is NOT recommended by Unicode), during which other authors can address their claims. If such a claim is found in this phase, the logo will be removed immediately. After a reasonnable period these prepublished logos would become universally usable in their unaltered form (including its colors, layout, dimensions and typography) and further claim would still be possible but only for a public statement where such restricted usage is authorized on a royaltee-free and non time-limited licence donated to the Unicode.org committee, which could then not change or extend any term of the usage policy for these logos. If such future change is needed for the policy (for example if Unicode becomes a ISO committee, and has its domain name changed to a new international ISO domain), then Unicode would need to remove the logos or get an explicit authorization from the original authors, but Unicode would still keep its full rights on the whole logo which uses the protected name "Unicode" or the unique "UNi" ligature, so that legacy websites using them would not be forced to remove these logos from a lot of unmaintained web pages. This means that a web page is not authorized to change the link without adhering to the new usage policy published in any new domain, even if the "unicode.org" domain name is deregistered. If the link stops working, the only thing that the website author could do would be to remove both the logo and the link, and find a newer logo and link for the new domain name according to a newer usage policy... Sun already has such a policy for the Java(tm) logo, however it is more restrictive as it requires a registration with a valid email that the user must maintain valid in order to be able to receive mandatory notices of changes in the logo usage policy. The W3C and the ICRA content rating system publish some good policies for the logos that can be used in websites that conform to their specifications.
