User talk:Marnanel/CivicHeraldry pages

One problem is that "fair use" is a US concept. I'm also concerned that the site you have got permission from may not have that permission to give. Are you sure they are all photographs? Secretlondon 20:02, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Only a very few of them appear to be photographs. Most seem to be drawn from the blazon. I took the copyright information I was given in good faith-- you could maybe mail Robert Young [1] and ask for some sort of audit trail if you like. Marnanel 20:35, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)

The problem is not copyright of photographs but of displaying the arms themselves. Also many councils, mine (City of Sunderland) included grant permission only to the original requestor and only for one specific purpose. By approaching the relevant council directly it might be possible to get a high quality version – most will keep such a copy for their printing sections. ---garryq 15:41, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I know that strictly speaking permission to show the arms is a matter for the armiger to decide, but as I understand it the law on this point is kind of murky. This is what I said on my user talk page on cy: (in English) on this point:

Hi. Do you know the copyright status of the arms you are uploading? I think they might be nice on en - but en is far stricter about that sort of thing. Morwen

Well, it's an interesting story. The images I'm using come from civicheraldry.co.uk [2]; I mailed the webmaster and asked his permission. He said, fine, as long as the images link back to the site. He also pointed out that copyright is only half the problem: strictly speaking, the owner of a coat of arms can sue for false assumption of arms if someone uses the coat without permission, a bit like the way a company can sue you if you start using their trademark: in a similar way to the usual policy on company logos, I think our use here is fair use.

I say "strictly speaking" because this law has been used once in two hundred years (the case was Manchester Corporation v Manchester Palace of Varieties (1954) if you want to look it up). So I think we should be pretty safe, at least with English and Welsh heraldry. (Heraldic law really does have teeth in Scotland, on the other hand, and if I had any Scottish heraldry I would think many times before putting it up.)

However, the webmaster of civicheraldry.co.uk says that councils occasionally do get sniffy about his cataloguing of their arms. When I mentioned this on the Village Pump and IRC, the consensus seemed to be that it seemed reasonable to go ahead with what we had and deal with any complaints ad hoc.

I've put a few up in en:-- the ones for Hertfordshire, my county of birth. (I'm asking permission to use a bot to help with adding the rest on en:, since there are a few hundred.) I thought it would be good to give cy: first bash at the Welsh ones, though :) . Does all this seem sensible to you? Marnanel

I thought, given this, it would be sensible to use the images and deal with any requests from the armigers ad hoc. What do you think? Marnanel 16:12, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Looking at the images, they appear to be in a range of styles, which suggests that they were not drawn by the civic heraldry website but rather merely assembled there. If that's the case then I don't see that that site's permission means anything! Doops | talk 03:46, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Purely from a copyright point of view the owner of that site cannot give permission. The heraldic laws probably dont concern wikipedia (in Florida) that much. However we should not claim that these images are "with permission" and they should have a real fair use justification (or be deleted). Justinc 13:01, 24 March 2006 (UTC)