Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Daniel Kinzler <daniel AT brightbyte.de>]

Hello all

First of all, thank you for creating the most useful Open Content
licenses around. Great work!

I would like to bring up an issue I have come across several times as an
admin at Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons: the question of a free license
for logos.

The problem is how one can protect a logo from abuse while releasing it
under a free license at the same time.

When I talk to people that are concerned with maintaining licenses, they
usually say that it's no problem: simply register it as a trademark and
put it under a free license. Problem solved.

However, if you ask a project to release their logo like that, they
usually say no, because:

* trademarks have to officially be registered (and refreshed) in each
country, which takes time, effort and money. In fact, it can get very
expensive.
* it may be impossible to register a trademark in a country without
founding some legal body there.
* trademarks only apply to a specific market segment.
* trademarks are much harder to enforce internationally, compared to
copyright.

Another concern is if this: if the owner of a trademark explicitly
grants usage rights to anyone, this may be interpreted to include the
trademarks rights, if this is not explicitly reserved.

Thus, people decide to use copyright to protect their trademark, and
don't use a free license. Several big Open Source and Open Content
projects have unclear and/or restrictive licenses for their logos,
because of this issue. Example that come to mind are Mozilla, Debian,
and Wikimedia, not to speak of the CC logotypes themselves.

None of the problems described above arise with using copyright to
protect a logo. Thus, I propose to create a license "feature" for CC
licenses to be used with logos. This should include:

* Explicitly exempt all trademark rights from the "free use", in case
the logo is trademarked.
* Reserve the right to use the logo for other projects/products, for
promotion or to express endorsement. This should also be the case for
derivative work.


I really hope that this issue will be addressed by future versions of CC
licenses (and other free licenses). The current situation is kind of
ironic. Ugly patches http://creativecommons.org/policies should not be
necessary.

Best Regards,
Daniel Kinzler

-- 
Homepage: http://brightbyte.de