> Since *you* are a lawyer and an intellectual property specialist, > would there be any chance that *you* could maybe check the copyright > status out for us? >
Copyright status is not really the one to be worrying about, at least not IMHO. Copyright protection is not ubiquitous, contrary to popular belief. It depends on lots of different things, i.e. whether the territory in which copyright is to be enforced or recognised actually recognises the right as such, whether or not registration is required, whether or not the territory has signed up to international copyright conventions, the nature and physical reality of the creator or its assignee, and above all, whether the work for which protection is sought or claimed is "original", or "new" or "distinctive" or "derived from other works" or "bears the imprint of its creator", these latter expressions being particular to a given territory and its accompanying legal system. So there is no easy answer to give when determining copyright status, since it is highly dependent on national legislation and jurisprudence. Trademark law has similar constraints of course, but is generally the object of internationally and mutually recognised treaties, and "easier" to apply, since the right either exists (as in has been filed for as a trademark registration) or doesn't. Rights acquired through use are on the whole only now of importance in the US, where usage in state commerce on the one hand, and federal trademark registrations on the other, rely on different laws to be applicable (the first being state legislation, and the second being federal legislation). The main advantage of trademark law is that using it is relatively swift and easy for a trademark holder, including obtaining injunctive relief and summary judgments, because it relies on a filing, the limits of which are fairly easy to determine. It is not for nothing that Sun had a legal department to deal with these issues (both copyright and trademarks) :-)) So, rather than looking at copyright, it would be better to trawl through the national trademark registries, where available, and see if anything covering the activities intended by LibreOffice has been filed as a stylised airplane. Graphical trademark searches are often notoriously difficult to carry out, even when they are possible (not all countries have databases, and many of them do not include graphical representations of logos or logotypes. Alex -- E-mail to [email protected] for instructions on how to unsubscribe List archives are available at http://www.libreoffice.org/lists/marketing/ All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
