Hacker News Reader

Comment by shlubbert | Hacker News Reader

A similar scourge of mine is Wikipedia contributors helpfully "tracing" company logos so they can be uploaded as vector graphics (great in theory!) but introducing all kinds of mistakes in the process or using the wrong fonts... also causing the wrong logos to spread all over the internet.

View on HN

That's the punishment companies get for not providing their official logos for download in an easy format without fuss.

If you have a startup, have a "media kit" page with all of this stuff. Logos for black and white backgrounds in open vector and raster formats, founder photos, bios, company intros, product photos, video clips of your product that you're okay with media cutting up and using.

If you want it to be usable on Wikipedia, how do you assign the IP?

Wikipedia lets you specify the license. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#/media/File:Tux.svg has three permission details, including Creative Commons CC0 1.0.

A lot of companies release press kits for proper usage of their logos without necessarily transferring the IP. I imagine in a lot of cases (including Wikipedia) it falls under fair use -- ultimately the logo is still trademarked.

Release it under a CC 4.0 license. Section 2b2:

> Patent and trademark rights are not licensed under this Public License.

IIRC a lot of logos technically don’t meet the threshold of originality so they’re not even copyrightable

In particular, as well as the obvious "can't copyright a circle" concept, wordmarks often don't qualify for copyright. Even if the typeface is copyrighted (as many are), that doesn't transfer to writing in that typeface. As usual, exactly where and to what extent that is true can vary around the world.

Trademark rules still apply, so you still can't take the Google wordmark and slap it on your company even if the logo is on Wikipedia Commons.

Ideally, your logo in your website should also be a SVG or at least a transparent PNG. I definitely pick it up from Wikipedia when I go do a presentation if it's not there.

I really love a detail in Vercel’s webpage, if you right click on the logo, it offers you a link to go to the press kit page.

There's also nothing stopping the company itself submitting the correct logo. While, as far as I know, it's usually considered a conflict of interest to directly edit your own article as an organisation, you can upload the logo and request on the talk page of the article that correct image be used.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com