Copyright Question

[Mark Doliner]

On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 9:04 AM, Felina Noctis <Felina_Noctis at web.de> wrote:
> Hi there,
> I'm not very skilled in searching on your side and looking at the FAQs I
> didn't find the answer I was lookind for, so I hope you don't mind me
> sending you an email!
> I really like this bird you've got for a symbol and would like to
> suggest it as a smilie for my favourite internetplatform. You find it
> under www.comicforum.de, it is about comics and books and music, nothing
> strange or illegal or anything. But because you allways have to be
> carefull about Copyright, I wanted to ask if it is allowed to use your
> bird - the pidgin - as a smilie there. I mean, I found a lot of banners
> on your page, maybe we could use one of those? But I want to make sure,
> because it is allways best to ask for permission before using something
> that belongs to someone else! :-)
> Thank you very much for your time!
> Stefanie aka Felina Noctis

I don't think we have an official policy about things like this.  How
do people feel about allowing this as long as the logo is used as a
reference to Pidgin?  So for example, if you type ":pidgin:" to insert
the smilie then it's fine.  But it's not ok to type ":purple bird:" or
":bird:" or ":im:"  And somewhere you would probably want to include
the text "The Pidgin logo is copyright Instant Messaging Freedom, Inc.
2006" (is that right?  Who holds the copyright to our logo?)

-Mark