Re: Logos as trademarks [was Whales, owls, and geezers ]

I am not a lawyer.

I presume that a trademark must be presented in such a way that it is
recognisable as the trademark. There is a difference between the
prewsentation of a bitmap image on a macintosh and on a PC, due to
differences in colouring and I believe pixel size. In any event, there are
diffeences on my computer, determined by the fact that sometimes I use 256
colours for the display and sometimes about a million times that. Sometimes I
have the display very dim, to conserve battery power, and sometimes I have it
very bright, so I can actually read it.

I assume that when a visual trademark is represented to somebody who cannnot
see it that it is whether or not something  is recognised as a mark that
counts. For example, certain organisations have registered particular phrases
as a trademark. The font is not as relevant as the way they use the phrase.

In actual fact many organisations have a logo, which is a visual identifier.
In some cases it is made of text, in some cases it isn't. I can think of two
organisations that make extensive use of a butterfly, and two that use a
simple coloured blob repeated in such a way as to give the imporession of
text. One of the above also uses an image of their name quite extensively.

The purpose of these uses seems to me graphic. The purpose of making buttons
that have a particular graphic representation seems to be to provide a
reasonable default presentation, that presumably has some consistency with
the overall site design (this is after all something that we suggest in
WCAG).

So I am afraid I cannot see the how the "legal requirement" can be justified,
but I think that in certain cases there are graphic devices which actually
consist of text. I am not convinced that a button is one of these, where it
is presenting text as the identifying mark, and I think that in order to meet
the conformance requirements of WCAG a site which used them would be required
as a last resort to provide an alternative version that did not (and also
meets the other WCAG requirements).

Charles McCN

On Sun, 22 Oct 2000, Leonard R. Kasday wrote:

  Even though I'm a hawk on not using text in images, I think there is at 
  least one special case we have to accommodate:
  
  When a logo is a trademark, it must be presented in a precisely controlled 
  manner to protect the trademark legally.    So we've got to allow bitmap 
  (or compressed bitmap) images of text in logos that are trademarks.
  
  This holds at least until precise, uniform implementation of SVG are 
  available... and perhaps not even then... e.g. if the end user can change 
  the rendering... this is a legal question and I'm not a lawyer.
  
  And there may be other sorts of logos for which legal protection requires 
  precisely controlled rendering.  A legal opinion is needed here.
  
  Len
  
  At 07:35 AM 10/21/00 -0700, William Loughborough wrote:
  >It's become a Rachel Carson/Ralph Nader kind of thing.
  >
  >Maybe stopping the construction of a dam because it would make darter 
  >snails extinct strikes many of us as absurd but... About 40 years ago the 
  >Boeings were about to take the first steps in launching a fleet of 
  >supersonic airplanes (even named a basketball team after that 
  >undertaking!) but some "academic type" went before congress and said that 
  >he could prove to the satisfaction of his peers that a large fleet of such 
  >specifications would destroy the ozone layer and one of our main 
  >protections against radiation poisoning would go bye-bye. If he was wrong 
  >the consequences are that we still take 17 hours for some flights that 
  >might have taken 5 or so. If he was right and we went ahead with the 
  >shorter flights we'd all have cancer and be working hard to come up with a 
  >means of restoring the ozone layer (or live in caves).
  >
  >In my beloved Pacific Northwest are bumper stickers: "save a logger's job, 
  >kill a spotted owl". One of the points is that owl protection is via 
  >protecting their habitat and it may be that the ramifications of this 
  >effort help maintain our oxygen supply, etc. Similar thing with whales 
  >which came close to extinction so that dog food stayed cheap and pianos 
  >could have "natural" whalebone instead of plastic covers on their keys 
  >(long since that "tickling the ivories" was a misnomer: there just aren't 
  >enough elephants to kill for real ivory keys).
  >
  >OTOH geezers are in a strange position because everyone wants to live long 
  >(without of course "growing old") as in "I hope I'm as sharp as you when I 
  >get to be 75" but some of the accompanying conditions are glossed over. 
  >I'm fairly certain that I can read a certain line on the eye chart, 
  >without glasses, at a greater distance than 90% of the people on these 
  >lists, but unless I use really good lighting or a magnifier I can't read 
  >the usual phone book. Started noticing this about 45 years ago. So my 
  >message about these parts is: you're going to get old thanks to the 
  >"miracles of modern medicine" but it will have side effects that are/mimic 
  >*real* disabilities. So take this guideline stuff as seriously as do the 
  >people who hug trees to prevent their felling.
  >
  >How, you might be asking does all this fulsome raving fit into the GL WG 
  >list? Well, the current brouhaha about text-as-image is about as good a 
  >place to draw a line in the sand as any other. My bottom line is: the W3C 
  >logos that might violate our principles ("erect no barrier 'twixt content 
  >and user") aren't even that great as design, at least in my opinion. 
  >They've got to go. This will be more in the vein of making a statement 
  >than about making some fairly trivial semantics available to people using 
  >80x magnification.
  >
  >Does anyone else think the statement is worth making - even in as 
  >simple/trivial an area as the logo of an organization that purports to 
  >speak for us geezers?
  >
  >--
  >Love.
  >                 ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
  >
  
  --
  Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
  Institute on Disabilities/UAP and Dept. of Electrical Engineering at Temple 
  University
  (215) 204-2247 (voice)                 (800) 750-7428 (TTY)
  http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday         mailto:kasday@acm.org
  
  Chair, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Evaluation and Repair Tools Group
  http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/
  
  The WAVE web page accessibility evaluation assistant: 
  http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/
  

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053, Australia
September - November 2000: 
W3C INRIA, 2004 Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Monday, 23 October 2000 06:00:39 UTC