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

[Baiju M]

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 5:14 AM, Tres Seaver <tseaver at palladion.com> wrote:
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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

The font is "Released under GNU GPL v3, with font exception." (from font file)

http://hiraneffects.blogspot.com/2008/03/thanks-perizia-is-now-font.html?showComment=1205148360000#c7861527171323151625

Regards,
Baiju M