Re: [Fedora-marketing-list] Fedora Wallpapers

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Warning - IANAL, and can't offer legal advice, etc. etc., these are just my thoughts:

On Sun, 9 Jul 2006, Dimitris Glezos wrote:
I believe that the CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License of Diana's work is not compatible because of the Non commercial and No derivatives clauses.

Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
Heh.  Licensing, content, and RPMs.  A fascinating topic.  :)

We don't yet have a clear policy for licensing of artwork. The Fedora logo, for instance, *cannot* itself be licensed because it's a trademark that we want to protect.

But what does that mean for projects that seek to reuse that artwork? Makes it very difficult.

FWIW I really think Creative Commons' Attribution ShareAlike license [1] is the most compatible artwork license for the ideals of Fedora.

I really don't like the idea of having NoDerivs applied to Fedora artwork as that seems to render it 'closed source' in a way. If other artists would like to take NoDeriv-licensed wallpapers, 'remix' them, and make them available, they cannot under the provisions of that license. The rationale for the NoDerivs clause on any artwork that uses the Fedora logo makes no sense to me. We're not licensing our code 'NoDerivs,' why would we want to license our artwork NoDerivs? It doesn't protect the logo - it protects everything in the image but the Fedora logo, case in point:

(1) If I wanted to take a nice wallpaper but modify it so it was say a Debian wallpaper rather than a Fedora one, it seems I could not because of the NoDerivs clause. If I took the wallpaper with the Fedora logo on a golf ball, for example, gimped out the Fedora logo and put in a Debian logo, that would be creating a derivative of that wallpaper thus violating the license.

(2) If I wanted to make a new wallpaper with the Fedora logo, I most certainly could and people have - Diana has a whole website full of them. So the NoDerivs clause does not seem to protect the logo at least in practice.

AFAIK, we are also looking to use Attribution ShareAlike for the new icons the Fedora Art team is working on [2] (please correct me if I'm wrong, Diana) The advantage of the CC licenses over the GPL (the GPL was used for the Bluecurve icon artwork) is that the CC licenses are written specifically to address media content, and the Attribution ShareAlike license is really the closest of the CC licenses in spirit to the GPL.

I understand that the logo licensing issue is complicated and hairy, but I think having artwork with a NoDerivs license just makes the situation worse. It seems to me that the presence of the logo in a piece of artwork suggests a more open license; otherwise the artist in question is taking the logo as it was their own IP and their right to license its usage which it is not. Wouldn't allowing people to do such jeopardize the trademark?

This all seems to be a sore topic though. How do we discuss this and move forward with a solid policy? I think this is a very important step for the Fedora Art team to grow.

~m

[1] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/
[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/BluecurveAndBeyond

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