[UbuntuWomen] Ubuntu, women and artwork...

[Micah Cowan]

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Vid Ayer wrote:
> On 5/4/07, Elizabeth Bevilacqua <lyz at princessleia.com> wrote:
>> People are getting quite upset and I want to make sure we are clear as
>> to what is Official in Ubuntu and what is not.
> 
> Ubuntu is still about the community, who get to decide what
> constitutes every aspect of this OS with openness and transparency in
> discussions.  If many women (and men) don't approve or feel strongly
> about the way women are being portayed by Ubuntu (even if it is not
> official),  then we need to listen to "diversity" too as Ubuntu is
> about humanity after all.

What makes you think that this portrayal was by Ubuntu? My strong
suspicion is that the people who created the artwork (at least, for the
first link) were not Ubunteros.

If this is the case, I really don't see what you can propose should be
done. You can't simply stop people from making such expressions, whether
you find them to be tasteful or otherwise. I'm fairly certain that
you'll find such depictions to fall under the protected realm of parody,
which is quite sufficient to prevent Canonical, trademark holders though
they may be, from preventing it.

Even if they happen to be Ubuntu users, I don't think there's much we
could do. If they happen to be official members of the community, then
we could consider a suspension of membership, but otherwise...

> So does it mean that anyone can create tasteless pictures of women,
> slap the ubuntu logo on it {from [0]}, burn CD's (non-commercially)
> and we do nothing because its non-official, no money exchanged hands
> and was within trademark policy ?

This is completely different, assuming that they portray these as
officially sanctioned, and AFAIK could absolutely be actioned against,
as it would fall well outside of parody and into trademark breach. If it
were to happen with a small, private group, amongst themselves as a sort
of joke, though, it would probably still qualify as parody. But until we
actually have a known case of this happening that someone wants to
object to, I don't see much point in debating the theory of whether or
not it would be right/wrong/legal/illegal.

People create things that other people find offensive, all the time. I'm
sure that the pictures in car windows of a certain rebellious lad
urinating on various rival car manufacturers' logos, for instance, are
far more offensive to those rival companies than any of these linked
graphics are to us. If those manufacturers are unable to do anything
about it, I'm not sure what Canonical or the Ubuntu community can be
expected to do about this.

(Any statements I've made regarding the law is of course only as I
understand it. I could absolutely be wrong about everything I just said;
I'm not a lawyer. This is just based on my limited understanding of
somebody else's field.)

- --
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer...
http://micah.cowan.name/
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