
Nice bit of law from Mike Godwin
Nothing about Nazis in there though.
Mine's the one with the copy of "Downfall" in the pocket.
A silly row between US feds and Wikimedia has kicked off over the fiddlers' use of the Feds' official seal. The New York Times reports that the Federal Bureau of Investigation penned a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation in July demanding that it remove an image of the FBI seal from a Wikipedia "article" about the feds. “ …
This shows just how warped the FBI thought process is.
Notwithstanding that Wikileaks has just set s record for unlawfully releasing more U.S. government 'secrets' in it's 200+ year history, some intelligence-challenged Special Agent expects them to give a hoot about copyright?
Little wonder they missed the Russian sleepers for so long!
Wikimedia is probably stating that, as the FBI is an agency of the US government, it and all things coming from it are in the public domain.
On the other hand, significant identifying marks of the US government, such as official department seals (the FBI is part of the Department of Justice), are subject to use restrictions that are not related to copyright (http://www.justice.gov/legalpolicies.htm#seals).
Since a Federal seal is a work of the United States government, it is not protected by Copyright, and therefore exists in the realm of Public Domain.
That being said, there *are* are regulations forbidding any person/organisation from establishing itself as a branch, employee, or representative of a Federal agency/bureau/department/government corporation when they do not have formal permission to do so. As indicated in the NYT article, the FBI is undoubtedly using a "prohibition of unlawful representation" ordinance to lean on Wikipedia.
This can be a tricky issue:
Wikipedia is using the seal as an element of fact in an (ostensibly) encyclopedic article ("This is the FBI's logo."), which means that it should be protected (at minimum) through Fair Use. On the other hand, the FBI could argue that since the seal is not eligible for Copyright protection in the first place, the Fair Use doctrine does not apply (i.e., their argument would be that Fair Use can only be applied against works that are Copyright-eligible).
Big Brother, for obvious reasons.
It's still missing a few things: a bald eagle (red, white, and blue, of course), WTC towers, an F-14/F-15 dropping smart bombs, a NASCAR race car burning its tires, and Jesus on the cross. Maybe a Hummer or two for good measure. That would totally send the right message about the current state of affairs here.
....you'll notice it's not the small, low-res PNG image they've got on the FBI article that the Feds are moaning about, it's the high-resolution, infinitely up-scalable, lossless SVG version that they don't like. The specific page referenced in the letter linked is not the FBI Wiki page, it's:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US-FBI-ShadedSeal.svg
Wikimedia have a point that the law doesn't seem to stop them publishing it but so do the Feds - you can kinda see why they aren't too chuffed that a high-res render of their seal is available on Wikipedia...
"A quick search through Google images with the “labelled for re-use” licence option switched on returns zero results of the FBI seal."
Though if you search for "FBI logo" instead, there's an image of the seal on Flickr marked as cleared for re-use (albeit nowhere near as high res as the Wiki version).
So the FBI has nothing better to do with our tax money then to go after Wikipedia for a logo?
Should I go down the list of terror attacks and attempted terror attacks on our country in the last 12 months alone or am I being silly; a logo on a website is more important.
If I said it once this year i'll say it again. What would happen if this was going on under GW Bush. The left would be going crazy since the left largely controls wikipedia.
Who wins when the left fights the left.
Just wait till the govt runs your healthcare suckers.