link to us: viral marketing

David,

If you are following the gist of the argument so far, the intention is 
that companies and individuals might provide 'public domain' graphics.
Why on earth would they, because like webpages, people use them, but if 
they use them to communicate, then they are even more closely tied to 
peoples very existence. The big M that signifies something, but the 
'heart' symbol for many is of greater significance. Walls ice cream use 
a derivative as their trademark. So it might be in Walls interest to 
provide a very nice heart symbol that was in the public domain, but 
maybe just referred to their trademark. 
http://www.angloamerican.free-online.co.uk/walls.gif

I don't know which sites you visit, but i find it very rare these days 
not to see a favicon in the address bar, some of these are truly 
excellent, for instance Lego. It seems unlikely that anyone would make 
a legal case for removing them from an external website, that was using 
them as a link.
However their size is small and they don't scale well.

The fact is that many users, including young children (see 
bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/ ) need graphics, because they don't or can't read.
Graphics can also be quicker to find and use less screen space for some 
activities.

thanks

Jonathan

On Monday, January 19, 2004, at 08:17  am, David Woolley wrote:

>> As with words, image meaning is certainly context-dependant, and
> ** in many cases assume prior knowledge by the target audience in order
> ** to be inequivocably understood. Company logos such as the McDonalds
> ** golden arches are certainly easier to recognise, but that's only 
> because
> ** they are logos, copyrighted/trademarked/whatever...so it's less 
> likely
> ** that designers will use them for anything other than something to do
> ** with the company (or risk a law suit, perhaps). For everyday things,
>
> More precisely, anything other than a reference to the company which
> has been authorised (normally in writing) by the company, is likely
> to attract the lawyers; it will do so even if the use is inoccuous,
> as that is the only way to defend against sites that you would not
> want to use it (even to reference you) using it.
>
> The use of *any* symbol for a company, developed by that company, is
> likely to be treated as a trademark by their lawyers.  This may be the
> reason why favicons, which seem to represent a de-facto implementation 
> of
> a link to me graphic, are not more widely used by companies.  (favicon 
> is
> implemented by a link element as well as by the rather unpopular one,
> with site operators, of a reserved URL local part).
>
> I think some companies would like to be able to treat home page URLs
> as trademarks in this respect, and many would like to impose 
> restrictions
> on deep links.
>
> Companies in coutries that permitted "cookie-like" features without
> explicit informed consent (I believe the UK is not longer in this
> category) might well want any use of their image to be sourced from
> thier site, so that they could track usage of referring sites using
> Referrer headers on requests.  Others would want this to ensure that
> only the standard version of the trademark is ever used.
>
>
>

Jonathan Chetwynd
http://www.peepo.co.uk
"It's easy to use"

Received on Tuesday, 20 January 2004 02:24:27 UTC