[Zope-dev] Legal formalities to accept log and design

[Tres Seaver]

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Christophe Combelles wrote:
> Jens Vagelpohl a écrit :
> On 1/24/10 13:08 , Baiju M wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>     I would like to know the legal formalities required
>>>> to accept a logo (with special font).
>>>> Also I would like to know the same for web design.
>>>>
>>>> Is there any guideline for Zope Foundation ?
>>>>
>>>> BlueBream team want to use a logo designed by an external person:
>>>> http://muthukadan.net/bluebream/bluebream-logo-v1.png
>>>> The font used there (Perizia: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Perizia_fonts) is
>>>> designed by the same designer and released under GPL.
>>>>
>>>> One of my friend has offered a web design for the site (not done yet).
> All that's perfectly fine. As Andreas said, there are no guildelines, as
> long as you are not using material that's already trademarked and
> copyrighted.
> 
>> maybe just be sure the original author won't claim anything in the future?
>> ie. the logo should be released with a free licence. Just to avoid the kind of 
>> troubles we had with new.zope.org
> 
> Using a GPL font for the logo surely won't force us to abandon the ZPL,
> no reason for concern there. The logo is nice, by the way.

Fonts and the GPL are complicated[1].  As that essay notes, under U.S.
copyright law, the "look" of a font cannot be copyrighted, which ought
to mean that an image which contains pixels derived from rendering the
font is not a derived work of the font:  it doesn't contain a copy or
transformation of anything copyrightable.

However, the issue gets muddy, even before you consided non-U.S. law.
So, before checking the image into the zope.org SVN repository (which
forbids any GPL'ed content without explicit approval), please check to
see that the font author has used the FSF's standard "font exception"
clause[2]:

 As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this font,
 and embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into the
 document, this font does not by itself cause the resulting document to
 be covered by the GNU General Public License. This exception does not
 however invalidate any other reasons why the document might be covered
 by the GNU General Public License.

If not, ask for the author to include that clause in the license for the
font (and document that to the foundation board, if the exception is not
published with the version of the font you use).  Or ask for a more
permissive (non-copyleft) licence, such as one of the Creative Commons
licenses.  If neither of those options is available, then I would ask
the foundation board for permission to check in the image.


[1] http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/20050425novalis

[2] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#FontException


Tres.
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Tres Seaver          +1 540-429-0999          tseaver at palladion.com
Palladion Software   "Excellence by Design"    http://palladion.com
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