CC logos
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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