howto using weberp logo

[dalescott]

Hi Tim,

the legal position is that the copyright to all contributions is and always has been owned by the authors of those contributions, unless they have specifically transferred that ownership in writing.

I fully agree with you here. When I said "The committers to the Sourceforge "web-erp" project ... share copyright of the codebase", I meant "sharing" in a general sense. You are correct of course that in the absence of a Copyright Assignment Agreement (CAA), which assigns the author's copyright to the project, each author will have copyright to the text they committed (and only the text they committed). As an aside, some projects use a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), with this approach an author retains copyright to their work but licenses it to the project. This prevents an author from exercising their copyright and revoking their commit (although it may also allow the project to use the code in ways the author didn't intend).

The same goes for the copyright of any logos that have been created.

I do not agree with this part. My understanding of copyright is that it applies only to words, not to graphic images. Copyright can be claimed for the word "webERP" (possibly including capitalization), but not the square font, or that "web" is dark on a light background and "ERP" is light on a dark background. Trademark must be used to protect the "look" of a logo.

A while back I researched how open-source projects protect their names and logos, and found the most popular and successful approach was a layered one:

• Use copyright to protect the name (e.g. "webERP" as text),
  
• Use a logo based the name (e.g. "webERP" as a stylized image) so the text in the logo will be protected by copyright, and
  
• Register the logo as a trademark to protect its visual appearance.
  

This approach prevents someone from representing themselves or their fork as the better or more "official" project by using the same name or similar logo, and mitigates any damage they can do to the credibility of the "real" project. However, even if copyright or a trademark are not registered, their historical use can still be argued as a defence (at least in Canada), which is why the commit in the repo and to the Wikipedia Commons are so important to establish precedent.

Cheers!