[Commons-l] COA copyright policies and other legal stuff,..

Fri Jul 7 15:57:05 UTC 2006

Paddy brings up something very interesting with regard to the newspaper's use.  

A coat of arms consists of two different things: the heraldic definition and the graphic representation.  Typically,  where a city has a copyright on its COA, it is only a graphic representation that the city or locality has copyrighted.  A heraldic definition may be artistically interpreted, thereby circumventing the city's copyright on the COA.  The legal definitions vary from country to country.  

For instance, in the United States, the graphical representation that most states use as seals are the copyrighted property of the US state in question, and therefore are not considered free.  However, a graphical representation of the seal may be used in its place as the "state seal".  

This, of course, will not satisfy a good many of our end users, who will see anything but what the state/city uses, to the exact pixel, as "wrong", thereby eliminating its use at any project that disallows "fair use" images.

It also should be noted that an artistic representation of a COA is copyrightable, and therefore must be released prior to upload.

Cary Bass
"Bastique"
> 
> From: "Zachary Harden" <zscout370 at hotmail.com>
> Date: 2006/07/06 Thu AM 05:03:55 EDT
> To: commons-l at wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Commons-l] COA copyright policies and other legal stuff,..
> 
> Dear Paddy,
> 
> I just think it depends on the nations that the coat of arms are registered 
> in. Some might have Public Domain status granted to them since Day One of 
> use, while others have to sit through the test of time. While I am not 
> familiar with Slovak law, I would wait and see what it says before we take 
> any action.
> 
> Rgds, Zach
> 
> 
> >From: Patrick-Emil Zörner <paddyez at yahoo.de>
> >Reply-To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List <commons-l at wikimedia.org>
> >To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List <commons-l at wikimedia.org>
> >Subject: [Commons-l] COA copyright policies and other legal stuff,..
> >Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2006 09:01:00 +0200 (CEST)
> >
> >Since Eric was posting a hint on all common admins talk pages I use
> >this opportunity to talk about a subject I strongly feel about.
> >
> >BTW I am subscribing to this ML and have been since the beginning. The
> >reason I have not been reading the ML or making posts here is a
> >completly differnt one.
> >
> >When I was trying to go through the deletion tags to dispose images
> >that are against the commons policy I found the following:
> >
> >http://commons.wikimedia.org//wiki/Template%3ASlovakCityCOA
> >
> >Concerning COAs my believe always was that we have to care about:
> >
> >1) Copyright(, Urheberrecht,...) whatever it may be in your country
> >2) It must be commercial.
> >3) People must be able to modify it.
> >
> >To 1) in most cases we do not need to care about that dealing with
> >COAs since they are ooooooooooold.
> >However the points 2) and 3) make me feel uneasy and I know there was
> >a long discussion on de WP.
> >
> >Concerning point 2) some of you might know that the german newspaper
> >"Die Zeit" was using the COA of the federal state and city Hamburg and
> >needed to change the COA on the front cover because of a senat
> >decision in Hamburg. Personally I think that such a behaviour is
> >silly. I mean it is not like they have been printing toilet paper with
> >the COA of Hamburg and selling the stuff. Even printing the COA of a
> >town on t-shirts and selling them could cause legal trouble IMHO.
> >
> >To 3) the Brockhaus Multimedial (a germen encyclopedia on DVD) uses
> >stylised COAs. I totally do not get why they did that. What I am
> >saying is that this could be interpreted as a modification plus
> >commercial use. Modifing a COA and selling the stuff on some
> >merchandising items could cause legal problems too IMHO.
> >
> >Summary: I do not think that COA go 100% with wikimedia project
> >policies concerning points 2 and 3. Personally I even think that COAs
> >as a picture in an encyclopedia are nice to have but not necessary.
> >But since they seem accepted in the Wikimedia projects commons should
> >keep them all and without exception since they are PD with some legal
> >framework attached to them. Therfore I suggest that in cases like the
> >slovak COA we ignore the terms of use and leave it up to the one that
> >uses these images to read the terms of use. The slovak terms of use do
> >not even seem very strikt as far as I can understand the language.
> >
> >Last but not least I think that the wikimedia projects had the wrong
> >approach dealing with COAs. They should IMHO have waived using them.
> >Only COAs that had 100% leagal permissions from the city/country
> >should have been used. While the WM-projects were growing there could
> >have been an open window to leagaly enforce WM-projects to use the
> >COAs because the cities would have wanted us to use them because
> >without saying the WM-projects make even the smallest town known in
> >the internet.
> >
> >What do you think?
> >
> >greetings
> >
> >Paddy
> 
> 
> 
> 