I am about to publish some use cases for an open source visualization I did for hierarchical data. One use case is sports data, e.g. visualizing the super bowl play by play. I would like to use the team logo images from Wikipedia for that with proper attribution. Can I do that or is there a different way to do it ?
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It will come down to Fair Use of a trademark: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use_(U.S._trademark_law), which is a slightly harder standard to meet than copyright law.– philshemCommented Jun 16, 2019 at 19:22
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Can your dataviz hotlink wikipedia’s Fair Use copy of the logos. e.g. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:National_Football_League_logo.svg– philshemCommented Jun 16, 2019 at 19:24
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Ask your lawyer. (Or don't, depending on how serious your project is. No one is going to sue you about a hobby web page showing some logos.) Most logos are copyrighted and the owner has not given permission for such use, but depending on what jurisdiction you operate in, there might be exceptions such as fair use that allow you to use them without permission. There is also trademark law to consider, but that typically does not prevent use of the logos as long as they are not misleading (e.g. implying some sort of relationship between you and the team) or commercial.
