On 2/24/09 4:06 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> The Iceweasel question is "Does it violate the definition of free
> software to permit logos released under licenses permitting only
> restricted distribution?"  Most people other than Debian would say no,
> because 1) they're a tiny part of the software and easily removed, and
> 2) they're trademarked, so you couldn't use them for much even if they
> weren't copyrighted.  Wikimedia's logos (well, except the MediaWiki
> one) are copyrighted with all rights reserved, so probably Wikimedia
> disagrees with Debian on this.
>
> The question that I asked, though, was "Do we want to use or
> distributed copyrighted/trademarked logos *without* *any* *permission*
> from the rights-holder?"  We are *not* talking about a case where the
> logo is licensed for people to use only restrictively.  We're talking
> about a case where the logo is not licensed at *all*.  You can't just
> go ahead and take a major corporation's logo and incorporate it into
> your software without permission.  Whether you use the GPL, BSD, MIT,
> proprietary licenses, or whatever, that's just illegal, or at least
> possibly so.

<IANAL>
My impression is that this is just as legal as referring to a company by 
name -- it's not an infringement to use someone's trademark to *refer to 
them*, whereas it is to *use the mark or something overly similar to 
creation confusion and imply you are associated with the mark holder*.

However, I don't know just how true this is going to be of logos. :)
</IANAL>

-- brion

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