Bazaar logo: licence?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

John Arbash Meinel writes:

 > Mary Gardiner wrote:
 > | The latter uses the justification that "Bazaar is licensed under the GNU
 > | GPL". I don't know that the licencing of the logo follows from that: the
 > | logo does not ever seem to have ended up in bzr trunk's repository.

Even if it were in the repo, that can be considered "mere aggregation"
if the copyright holders choose to claim that they consider the logo a
trademark which is not part of the software.  (This would be difficult
to support if it were linked into the binary, but I assume it's always
loaded on demand from a separate file.  See below, however.)

 > So it is more an issue of trademark rights. As I don't believe GPL (as a
 > software license) really applies to a trademark image.

A license is a license.  It may be a bad license for some purposes for
a given kind of content, but it's still a license.  The question is
whether the owner of the Work (here, the logo) purposefully or
inadvertantly used that license for that Work.  If so, it applies, and
the judge who has to deal with it has my condolences.<wink>

 > We *do* have a 'bzr.ico' file that is part of the trunk distribution,
 > which includes the 16x16, 32x32 and 48x48 size versions of the logo.

AFAIK these are usually built into the Windows binaries, are they not?
If so, you may have a legal problem claiming that is a trademark not
licensed under the GPL unless the trademark was registered before the
bzr.ico was introduced into the distribution.  At least under the
RMS/Moglen interpretation, everything in the file that ends up in the
executable image (plus some other stuff) is part of the source, and is
licensed under the GPL.

IANAL, etc., but you might want to talk to the FSF's legal staff about
this since the FSF can be pretty sensitive about varying
interpretations of the GPL.