Commons:Deletion requests/File:Flag of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.jpg

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File:Flag of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.jpg

contains the logo of seattle, which is copyrighted Thespoondragon (talk) 21:34, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

• Also should be deleted per nom: File:Seal of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.png Psiĥedelisto (talk) 07:11, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
• The Seattle city government's policy on intellectual property it produces, including the city logo, generally conforms to the level of openness that Commons requires, though it is not always as clearly articulated as ours. They've been forthcoming with releases every time we've asked for a clarification on any particular materials. See, for example {{PD-Seattle-Neighborhood-Atlas}}. Also, from http://www.clerk.seattle.gov/~public/phot1.htm (an archive of tens of thousands of photos), "Photographs contained in this database are public record and do not require permission for use" and the archive includes plenty of photographs (including photographs of documents: they don't seem to distinguish that as a separate thing) that include the logo, but someone could contact them on this if you are in doubt about this with respect to the logo as such. - Jmabel ! talk 06:36, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
• I just now wrote to the Municipal Archives (whom I deal with pretty often) hoping that they could help us sort this out. - Jmabel ! talk 03:19, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

This is really complicated

The following is from the correspondence that ensued. The Municipal Archive referred me over to Brandon Isleib in the city's Law Department, and even he is a little out of his depth here, but he did pass along a lot of useful information. From his email:

Weirdly enough, I was editing a wiki – one of the single handful of times I’ve done so – about 10 minutes before answering this. (The hrwiki.org entry for the Strong Bad email “Narrator” hadn’t picked up on that his saying “Ready? Let’s try it!” was from Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, and as a child of that era I thought it vitally important that somebody stand up for that knowledge.)

I don’t know which parts of the full answer at are most useful for thinking through your particular issue, but here it is:

1. The City seal is patterned from a model by artist James A. Wehn in 1936. Here’s the ordinance granting the City no-charge use of that model; some of that ordinance is in Seattle Municipal Code Section 1.08.010.
2. Because we use adaptations of that model (1.08.010 specifies the particulars that make the seal; it doesn’t have to be one particular image [the image in 1.08.010 notwithstanding], which is how it’s been allowed to changed over the years), we assert an interest in people not impersonating us with use of the city seal, or implying that we as a city did something officially that we didn’t do.
   • Interspersed remark by User:Jmabel: that would be a non-copyright restriction, more akin to a trademark issue.
3. That said, due to the ordinance wording, it’s not the City’s copyright, but the estate of James A. Wehn's so far as we know. He died in 1973, so my working assumption (I’m not a copyright lawyer; I’m a lawyer who knows weird City things) is that copyright remains with the estate until 2053 (life+80 years). As you can see in the ordinance, James didn’t give the City a right to sublicense; anyone who, from a copyright perspective (as opposed to an impersonating-the-City perspective) is using the City seal has to answer to his estate, not to us.

Does that clarify things sufficiently? Let me know if it doesn’t.

Thank you,

Brandon Isleib

Code Reviser

Excerpting from my reply:

I'm not a copyright lawyer either (nor am I a lawyer of any sort), but I'm sure you can imagine that as a Commons administrator I've had to deal a lot with copyright law. If Wehn's work was published in 1936 that would be under the old (pre-Berne Convention) U.S. copyright law, and I believe that even in the worst case the 95-year rule applies (see Commons:Hirtle_chart), and it will become public domain in 2032. And that presumes its copyright was renewed in 1954. Do you happen to know whether it was renewed? (That is researchable in any case, there's a registry of what was renewed.)

Then there would be the question of whether the current, more streamlined version of the logo has copyright in its own right as a derivative work. Do you happen to know when it was published? If it was before 28 February 1989 and was published without notice or registration, it wouldn't have any copyright of its own. On the other hand, if it was later than that or if it was registered, it's not going to be in the public domain in our lifetimes.

I have to say: I sure hope that this turns out to be public domain. Otherwise it raises issues about the copyright status of any photograph taken in various places in City Hall that show the Seal in a manner that is not de minimis and where the usage isn't specifically licensed by the city (which is, of course, why I'm trying to get some sort of release for that CHAZ flag). E.g. File:Mayor's_Youth_Council_member,_2003_(3231899716).jpg is presumably fine because the Municipal Archives gave a CC-BY license, and the ordinance you linked pretty clearly lets them do that, but what if it hadn't been taken by a city employee? Another example: File:CM_Bagshaw_Family_(24342611215).jpg (again, that was taken by a city employee, and was licensed by the City Council, but what if some private citizen had taken the picture)?

I realize that in practice a lot of this is moot. The reason it is relevant for me is Commons:Project scope/Precautionary principle. Wikimedia Commons is tremendously strict about following copyright law, initially because we wanted to minimize the chance that any reusers of our materials are exposing themselves to lawsuits, but now on sort of a cultural basis.

And from his further reply:

I think the last logo change was before 1989. There's an Archives box with a lot of the various logo designs over time that will be accessible again some post-COVID day; I've looked through it, and the records didn't go up to 1989. (The last seal-related anything we did was related to the City Flag, which was in July 1990.)

I don't know anything about the history of the seal apart from the City's interplay with it.

My uneducated and definitely unofficial guess is that the estate thinks about the copyright of Wehn's other works (he was a prominent sculptor of this area in his era) long before the City seal. They might have an interest but be uninterested in doing anything with it in an "oh, that old thing?" sort of way. But I've never met them and couldn't tell you their names, so who knows?

Also, tagged on the end of this, from Jeanie Fisher at the Municipal Archives:

Seattle Municipal Archives receives records from city agencies and departments, not private citizens, so the photos in our collections at least will have been taken by city employees. In the very rare exception that we’ve accepted photos from someone else, it’s noted in the online record for that photo.

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So:

1. This doesn't suggest to me any issues about the many images of the logo that come from photos or other materials used by the city, but it could be problematic for the CHAZ image.
2. It looks like the Wehn estate is where we'd need to go for any license; it also looks like the original seal will be out of copyright January 1, 2032. That, of course, presumes that they bothered to renew the copyright in 1954; does someone have a good way to look that up?
3. I'd make a strong guess that the modern "streamlining" of the image was early enough that it doesn't introduce a new copyright, since it was certainly without notice or registration. But of course we'd want to verify that as well.

I'll send the whole email thread to OTRS in case any of this is needed, with email addresses, etc. - Jmabel ! talk 01:29, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

Just a note that this correspondence is available as ticket:2020070310000391 for those with access. ~~ Alex Noble/1-2/TRB 10:42, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

•  Question Given that it's a city seal, I would expect it to have been widely distributed. Can we find a significant number of authorized copies made before 1978 without a copyright notice? Then it would fall under {{PD-US-no notice}}. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 05:17, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

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Deleted: according the mails, still copyrighted. --JuTa 09:45, 15 April 2021 (UTC)