Commons talk:Project scope/Update 2013/Must be freely licensed or public domain/Licensing terms

• Click on the 'Project page' tab, above to see the current policy/guideline wording that is under discussion on this page.
• To make a specific proposal, please start a new subsection and use the code below to put it in its own box. You can sign underneath the resultant box, but for technical reasons you can't use "~~~~" within it. Please number your proposal for ease of reference.

{{divbox|amber|Proposal number and title|Introduction
*text
*more text}}

Scope Review 2013 links: Discuss stage 2 of this review Translation Help your community by translating the review Background Main review page: Background and process FAQ Links to current rules Project Scope Photographs of identifiable people Discussion: Introductory Scope wording Aim of Wikimedia Commons Excluded educational content Discussion: Files Must be a media file Must be an allowable free file format Must be freely licensed or public domain Licensing terms Evidence Precautionary principle 'Realistically useful for an educational purpose' PDF and DjVu formats Discussion: Pages, galleries and categories General pages, galleries and categories User pages, galleries and categories Discussion: Areas of particular concern Censorship "Neutral point of view" Discussion: Identifiable people Lead Legal issues Consent Moral issues Identification Examples Removal requests Other image sources Other proposals Other proposals

Proposal 1

• It sometimes annoyes me when I see files like the Firefox or Debain logo being delted because they would not allow derivative works and are only allowed to be used in a specific context.
  • When do these restrictions not really matter? — If they can be enforced with trandemark law anyway.
  • Why do companies then choose to add these restrictions to the license? — I guess because copyright is easier to enforce across the borders of one country. As far as I know, even the WMF did not decide to put their logos explicitly under a free license.
• Comments? Opinion? -- Rillke^(q?) 07:26, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
  • We have File:Mozilla Firefox 3.5 logo 256.png and File:Debian-OpenLogo.svg, so these are bad examples. Trademarks generally vary from country to country, and in general they apply only when you use the logo as a trademark - that is, when you use it to sell a product. AFAIK many companies have trademark guidelines that really go beyond what trademark law really permits. darkweasel94 08:17, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
    • Nice to see you going through my contribs. I am not talking about stuff that “really go[es] beyond what trademark law really permits” but about cases where “[the restrictions] can be enforced with trademark law anyway”. These provided examples are not so bad in any way: File:Mozilla Firefox Logo.svg, Commons:Deletion requests/Debian logos. Trademark law differs from country to country and sometimes requires registration. That's why no one who holds the copyright of a logo is happy to publish them under a free license without restrictions. -- Rillke^(q?) 08:47, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
      • I am not going through your contributions, all project scope reform pages have been on my watchlist for a long time, so please don't assume bad faith. AFAIK trademark law cannot by itself prohibit making derivative works - it can only pose any problems if you use an image as a trademark. But I am not a lawyer. darkweasel94 09:07, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

aracters. ChrisHodgesUK (talk) 14:48, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

This topic appears to be of lesser interest/priority to the community than some of the others in this review, and I propose that we should close it down now. That will allow us in part 2 of the review to focus our full attention on the most important and/or contentious issues. Please comment at Commons talk:Project scope/Update 2013/Stage 2. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 17:48, 23 July 2013 (UTC)