CC logos

[Markus Demleitner <msdemlei@ari.uni-heidelberg.de>]

Dear Mentors,

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
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 a recent ftpmasters review, that fell through.

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?

But on the other hand I think what DaCHS is doing is pretty much
covered by the spirit of CC, and all alternatives (re-drawn logos,
fetching and caching logos on the deployers' sides, dropping the
logos altogether, including them from creativecommons.org directly)
sound like they're either in violation of the terms or just stink.

And in particular, I suspect Debian distributes at least some of
these logos somewhere already.

So... has anyone already thought more deeply about the CC logos and
their distributability?

Thanks,

         Markus