From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Wed Jun 16 2004 - 00:44:46 CDT
Michael Tiemann <tiemann at redhat dot com> wrote:
> 1. The Euro symbol is a logo of the new European currency.
Currency symbols are not generally considered to be logos; they do not
represent or identify a particular organization, government, or company.
They literally "belong" to everyone who uses the currency, and in a
sense, those who don't.
> 2. The (cc) symbol is not trademarked, so there is not the kind of IP
> issue as their would be around "usual" logos.
From http://creativecommons.org/policies:
"The double C in a circle, the words and logotype "Creative Commons,"
and any combination of the foregoing, whether integrated into a larger
whole or standing alone, are Creative Commons' trademarks."
Other passages on this page describe conditions that apply to the use of
the (cc) symbol. Its use is clearly subject to restrictions by the
Creative Commons Corporation.
To me, one distinguishing feature of a "logo" that is not suitable for
encoding is that it is clearly identifiable with a certain organization,
commercial, governmental, or otherwise. The McDonald's "Golden Arches"
and the Nike "swoosh" come to mind, as do national flags and emblems.
The (cc) symbol, just like the "copyleft" symbol, is closely associated
with a sponsoring organization with a cause to promote. Unicode encodes
characters, not causes.
Logos like U+3004 JAPANESE INDUSTRIAL STANDARD SYMBOL and U+327F KOREAN
STANDARD SYMBOL got into Unicode because of their presence in legacy
character sets, not because the Unicode Consortium had different
policies about logos at the time they were encoded.
> 3. If there were a "cc" character that could be enclosed by an
> enclosing circle character, then the symbol could be composed from
> Unicode characters. Thus, there would be no logo per se, but a means
> to construct what we want to make a symbol, by usage and acclaim, not
> a logo. But this would be less elegant than a single (cc) character
> because, as the enclosing characters page says, YMMV when using these
> enclosing symbols.
For maximum elegance, use graphics, as you are doing now.
The same rules apply to this symbol as applied to the copyleft symbol:
If there is demonstrable, reasonably widespread usage -- NOT confined to
the Web pages of the sponsoring organization or those of its members --
then that may be used to bolster the case for encoding. T-shirts and
baseball caps with the logo count for negative points.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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