[Fedora-marketing-list] Fedora Wallpapers

[Máirín Duffy]

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