[Commons-l] Re: Trademarks

Wed Sep 14 00:19:00 UTC 2005

Felipe Micaroni Lalli <micaroni at gmail.com> schrieb/wrote:
> The system is free but the Gnome logo isn't under free license. Try create a
> System with this logo. You can't.

That's trademark law, not copyright. Even if you draw a "confusingly
similar" image, which is not considered a derivate by copyright law and
of which you hold full copyright, you still can't use it to create your
own system. You can't even use the character sequence
"G"-"N"-"O"-"M"-"E", although it is inelegible for copyright.

On the other hand, tradmark law allows you to do whatever you want with
that logo unless you claim to be GNOME Foundation (or your products
theirs or endorsed by them).

> Like the Wikimedia logo.

The Wikimedia logos are actually both trademarked AND copyrighted by
Wikimedia Foundation.

Claus
-- 
http://www.faerber.muc.de