• CC logos

    From Markus Demleitner@21:1/5 to All on Mon Nov 9 18:10:02 2020
    Dear Debian legal list,

    I'm a bit reluctant to bring this apparently old topic again, but it
    seems it has not been resolved, while it does affect a number of
    packages.

    So, I'm currently packaging DaCHS, a publication framework for the
    Virtual Observatory,
    https://salsa.debian.org/debian-astro-team/gavodachs. The package
    tries to encourage publishers to be explicit about the licence the
    published data is made available under, and it therefore contains
    upstream the cc-0, cc-by, and cc-by-sa logos from creativecommons.org
    so that, in the metadata web pages, these things can be fetched from
    the server itself (rather than, say creativecommons.org).

    In an ftpmasters-triggered a review of the licences of the various
    things distributed with DaCHS, I noticed these didn't have an
    explicit licence.

    So, I started researching, and I found https://creativecommons.org/policies/#trademark, where it says

    CC’s trademarks are not licensed under a Creative Commons license

    Following the link under the statement, there is:

    You may download high resolution versions of the Creative Commons
    logos and use them in connection with your work or your website,
    provided you comply with our policies.

    -- which probably makes the particular use case (deliver them with a
    publishing toolkit) a violation of the terms in the first place.
    And, sure enough, that's farily certainly DFSG-nonfree, right?

    I'm not the first one to notice the issue; https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=829701 from 2016
    has a discussion on this, too.

    A quick research with apt-file shows a few packages besides dachs and
    mediawiki that already seem to have CC logos in Debian (quick
    selection: blobwars-data, dokuwiki, texlive-latex-extra, texlive-latex-extra-doc, ubuntu-packaging-guide*).

    So... has there been any progress on this question since 2016? Is
    there any prior art on how to deal with this kind of
    trademark-associated artwork?

    Thanks,

    Markus

    PS: can I ask for being cc:-ed?

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