[Foundation-l] RfC: A Free Content and Expression Definition

Tue May 2 22:21:49 UTC 2006

On 5/2/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> When each project has very limited fair use, pictures like logos or
> screenshots should not be an issue, Gerard. As I've argued before,
> there are going to be very, very few cases where a company will agree
> to license their logo under something like CC-ND. Imagine such a
> proposal being sent to Nike. "Dear Nike, we'd like to use your logo,
> could you please license it under Creative Commons No-Derivatives"?
> Corporate lawyers are all about risk minimization; seeing no benefit
> in such an arrangement, most of them would flat our reject the idea, I
> think.
>
The benefit would be that they get their logo in the Wikipedia article
on Nike.  For logos, though, companies would probably insist on some
sort of "educational use only" restriction.  CC-ND is just an example.

Of course, they'd only get that benefit if Wikipedia decided not to
use their image if they didn't give permission.  So there'd be a risk
there, but personally I don't think the Nike article would be any
worse without a picture of that swoosh.

> The use of CC-ND for logos would actually be dangerous as it could
> prevent us from looking for a better solution.

How would it do that?  And what better solution is available now?

> I don't think there's
> any court in this world who would find copyright infringement if we
> add the logo of a company to an encyclopedia article.

I'd like to hear from some actual lawyers as to whether or not they
think that's true.  I find it to be an incredibly bold statement. 
There are lots of jurisdictions in the world, and it's my intuition
that at least one of them must have some law against copying and
distributing a copyrighted logo in an encyclopedia.  But hey, I guess
I could be wrong about that.

> Our policies
> just need to allow making use of these exemptions to copyright law.
>
> Erik

Absolutely.  Whatever the "Free Content and Expression Definition" is,
it should certainly include Wikipedia (i.e. the entire content of each
article in the main namespace).

Anthony