this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
11 points (100.0% liked)

Fediverse

28226 readers
368 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Random question but does anyone know if the Lemmy logo is trademarked?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] zipsglacier 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

A license says what rules people have to follow to use something (a logo, in this case). So, it gives an owner control over how the thing is used. With a cc-by-sa license, the owners are basically saying "use it however you want, just credit the author and use a similarly unrestrictive license on what you make with it". Other things, especially company logos, have a much more restrictive licenses that are more like "don't ever use this, unless we explicitly tell you to (for an ad or something)."

Trademark registers something and says that other people can't make a similar thing and license it differently in their own. Like, if you made something kind of similar to the Mickey mouse logo, but changed the size or angle of the ears. A license can't stop you from using that to sell your products, because technically you're making your own new thing. But a trademark can stop you, because the new thing is too much like the old one. So trademarks have to be registered, to record who came up with it first, but licenses don't.

Edit to add: Oh, there are also "unregistered trademarks", basically common law trademark for something like a logo that already represents something. So I guess the Lemmy logo is an unregistered trademark by now.