Christian, On Tuesday, August 27, 2024 2:41:32 AM MST c.buhtz@posteo.jp wrote: > Dear Simon, > > thank you for your reply and thoughts. > > What confuses me is that there are two relationships: 1) Between the > logo author and the project 2) and between the project and the rest of > the world. > I am not sure how to solve it. > > A trademark is not an option for our project because of money and > manpower. > > Best > Christian All of what I am going to say has been said at least once in other parts of this discussion, but I think it is valuable to share it from my perspective as an upstream author of a project who has navigated a similar situation. I develop Privacy Browser. I created the main icon, which also acts as the project logo, by combining and modifying two icons released under the Apache 2.0 license. I decided to release the finished product under the GPLv3+, which is the same license as the rest of the project. https://www.stoutner.com/privacy-browser-pc/licenses/ To address your point 1 above, I own the copyright on the logo. In your case, the logo author originally owns the copyright on the logo. However, if you have paid the author to create it for you, it is not common for that copyright to be transferred to you. Even if you didn’t pay for it, the copyright can be transferred. Copyright transfer is a big subject that I won’t go into in more depth unless you have questions. In the case of Privacy Browser, I insist that all contributors transfer the copyright of their contributions to the project to myself (something that the Free Software Foundation recommends as a best practice, although it has become uncommon in recent years). https://www.stoutner.com/privacy-browser-android/contributors/ To address your point 2 above, the copyright holder can issue a license to the world to use the logo. But, as mentioned above, they can also exert trademark control over the logo. Debian will not ship a logo that is not licensed under a DFSG-free license. However, Debian will ship DFSG-free logos that also have trademark restrictions (almost all logos in Debian are trademarked). Trademark provides all the protections you are looking for. As previously mentioned, you can exert trademark protections without paying money to register the trademark. Trademark law (which varies by country) basically says that nobody else can impersonate your business by using your name or your logo in such a way that a customer or user would think that they are you. So, when you license software under the GPL, anyone can copy and redistribute it, but trademark law says they have to change the name and logo enough that the users can tell the difference between your project and theirs. In my personal experience, I have had no problems with releasing the icon under the GPLv3+, even though I have not registered a trademark. I have had a few people who have forked my project, some of whom have contacted me before doing so. In all cases, I have informed them that I am happy to have them fork the project and that all they would need to do is change the name and the logo and comply with the GPLv3+. In my experience, everyone who has forked my project was intending to change the name and logo anyway, because their whole purpose was to differentiate themselves from me. -- Soren Stoutner soren@debian.org
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