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

Hi,

One quick thought here. On October the 1st the Danish law that makes digital signature legally binding was finally inacted so now digital signatures can be used and are legally recognized. There is however no reason why a system similar to a digital signature cannot be used for logos, there may of course be technical prblems, but if this is important for big business I wonder why this have not been solved already. 

Claus

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Leonard R. Kasday <kasday@acm.org>
To: William Loughborough <love26@gorge.net>; <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 22, 2000 3:57 PM
Subject: Logos as trademarks [was Whales, owls, and geezers ]


> 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/
>

Received on Monday, 23 October 2000 16:56:15 UTC