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Intellectual Property Law

: IPKat

Rogue seal runs rampant in wiki world: FBI on the case

By Johanna Gibson, David Pearce, Jeremy Phillips and Ilanah Simon.

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The IPKat has probably blighted his standing among US law enforcement officers forever by reporting this, but the BBC got there first with "Wikipedia and FBI in logo use row", posted yesterday on that august institution's website.

Apparently a dispute has broken out between Wikipedia and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) over the use of the latter's seal (right). The FBI is reported as having written to Wikipedia's San Francisco office, informing it that unauthorised reproduction of the FBI Seal was prohibited by US law, which states

"Whoever possesses any insignia...or any colorable imitation thereof ... shall be fined ... or imprisoned ... or both".

Wikipedia denied that it had done anything wrong when garnishing its wiki entry for the FBI with an image of the seal, saying the FBI lawyers had misquoted the law.

Says the IPKat, it will be good to get a court ruling on whether Wikipedia can be said to "possess" the insignia by virtue of its having been uploaded on to a server. It would also be great to know whether the FBI has registered its seal as a US trade mark and whether it enforces the copyright in it. Come on, US readers, do let us know!

Merpel says, even if the FBI is right, is its position not a futile one, designed to generate ill-will and achieve nothing by way of compensatory advantage? An image search using Google, or indeed Bing, shows how ubiquitous those images are in the online world.

The IPKat thanks Craig Watson (Murgitroyd and Company) for this lead.

Full post as published by IPKat on August 04, 2010 (boomark / email).