When looking for possible sponsorship for pidgin-skype package (see
[1], and follow-up messages), I looked at the images located under
icons/ directory, they are very similar (if not perfectly identical) to
Skype trademark logos, whose terms of use [2] state the following:
"Skype’s trade marks and trade dress may not be used in connection
with any product or service that is not Skype’s, in any manner that
is likely to cause confusion among customers"
pidgin-skype is a third-party software, not provided or associated with
Skype other than it needs Skype application to be executed, so it could
not do use of the Skype logos.
But as you can see from copyright file, those images are not provided by
Skype directly, but from another source [3], which licenses them under
CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0:
Files: icons/*
Copyright: 2007, Jakub Szypulka - http://cubestuff.wordpress.com
License: CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0
I strongly believe Skype didn't allow author of those images to
redistribute them under CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0, and even if they are not
directly taken from Skype itself but generated via SVG files not
directly provided by Skype folks, they don't follow Skype terms of use,
so they can't be distributed by Debian.
This applies to pidgin-facebookchat package [4] too, which provides
Facebook logo (see [5], facebook*.png files), probably taken from the
same source [6], still not respecting Facebook terms [7]:
"You will not use our copyrights or trademarks (including Facebook,
the Facebook and F Logos, FB, Face, Poke, Wall and 32665), or any
confusingly similar marks, without our written permission."
I believe repacking upstream tarball to exclude logos is the way to go.
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2009/11/msg00011.html
[2] http://www.skype.com/intl/en/legal/terms/web/
[3] http://cubestuff.wordpress.com/2007/11/25/skype-goes-tango/
[4] http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pidgin-facebookchat.html
[5] http://source.debian.net/source/xref/main/p/pidgin-facebookchat/
[6] http://cubestuff.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/facebook-goes-tango/
[7] http://www.facebook.com/terms.php?ref=pf
--
.''`.
: :' : Luca Falavigna <dktrkranz@debian.org>
`. `'
`-
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