Re: Question about icons related to a trademark in a package

Soren Stoutner <[email protected]> Tue, 23 Dec 2025 11:04:31 -0700
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.legal
Organization	Debian
Message-ID	<2468793.iZASKD2KPV@soren-desktop>
On Tuesday, December 23, 2025 7:47:10 AM Mountain Standard Time Fabio Fantoni 
wrote:
> Hi, I'm having trouble figuring out what to do about packages that have 
> icons that appear to be related to trademark.
> 
> Regarding the xapp-symbolic-icons package, that I want to add a 
> prerequisite of cinnamon 6.6, I was trying to complete the 
> debian/copyright and help fix it upstream as well, but I'm having 
> trouble understanding what to do with icons that might be trademarked, 
> particularly a Windows icon: 
> https://github.com/xapp-project/xapp-symbolic-icons/issues/
9#issuecomment-3686
> 627626
 
> Is this icon acceptable? And would the copyright part I tried to do be 
> correct? Or is it not acceptable and should be replaced with one that 
> doesn't use a similar or identical logo to Windows?

The implications of trademark law depends a lot on how the icon is used.  If 
the icon is used in a way that would confuse a user into believing that they 
are using an official Microsoft endorsed product, then there are trademark 
implication.  However, if the icon is used in such a way that it indicates to 
users that something is *related* to Microsoft Windows, like indicating that 
Wine can run programs written for Windows, then this falls squarely into a 
fair use of a trademark, and it isn’t a problem (as long as the icon itself is 
released under a DFSG license).

Other examples of fair use of a trademark is writing a criticism of a product 
and including that product’s trademark icon to indicate to users what product 
you are criticizing, displaying a trademark of a competitor in your 
advertising to indicate that your product is better than theirs, or using a 
trademark of a competitor to indicate that your product can be used as a 
replacement for their product.

If, in a Linux file browser, Windows binaries have a small Microsoft Windows 
logo next to them to indicate they are not native Linux binaries, that is 
exactly the type of situation where the icon is indicating the file is 
associated with Windows, but a user would never be confused into thinking that 
file browser was saying they were now suddenly running Microsoft Windows 
instead of Linux.

In all cases, what makes these fair use is that it must be done in such a way 
that people understand that the trademark belongs to the other product.  If 
the user would be confused into thinking that trademark is attached to your 
product then it would not be fair use, as that is exactly what trademark law 
is designed to prevent.

-- 
Soren Stoutner
[email protected]
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