On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 8:26 PM, Brion Vibber <brion(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
[skip-skip]
<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
Brion,
I spoke to David Recordon and at OpenID foundation and he's saying that at
this point they don't have a legal basis for licensing these images and that
he's working on license for OpenID logo itself. David also promised to
connect me with people at Google who might help with licensing their logo.
<IANAL>
Looking at current trend of many companies using such images, I would say
that it can be considered safe to use it in MediaWiki until such licensing
gets into better shape.
</IANAL>
I think, I'll create a switch that will control display of images vs. just
text lables so extension users can decide for themselves if they want to use
icons until there is better licensing implemented.
Let me know if you feel this is a reasonable solution for the time being.
Thank you,
Sergey
--
Sergey Chernyshev
http://www.sergeychernyshev.com/