[Feature] Unambiguously Grant a Copyright License to CC Icons

[fenn]

Problem

so i was reading this page and saw the text "various Creative Commons license icons by Creative Commons used under CC BY" which i thought was rather strange as i had never seen anything like it before, but there it was on a creativecommons.org website, so surely it can't be wrong, right?

it got me thinkng, what exactly is the copyright status of the badges and icons? so i looked around on the website, finding nothing relevant except for the trademark policy which contains this text: "Creative Commons licenses the use of its public copyright license marks, which include the CC Logo, on the conditions..." which seems to be a trademark license grant, not a copyright license grant.

nowhere i looked could i find any explicit grant of copyright license, except for the blanket "Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license." at the bottom of the page.

copies of the badge images on wikipedia are marked as either CC-BY or PD and sometimes these PD images were allegedly uploaded by "Creative Commons" however there is currently no such user and the file upload trail inevitably leads back to some other user in 2008 or so. how did these people get the idea that the badges were public domain?

is this intentional? is everyone really supposed to attribute the CC badges themselves? it seems like a mistake or oversight, possibly as a result of the complicated interaction between trademark license and public domain dedications. where's the beef?

Description

Grant a copyright license to the license badge images and icons that does not require any attribution to Creative Commons.

Alternatives

• Public Domain - may have unforseen legal interaction with trademark license constraints
• CC0 - long and complicated, but it does explicitly retain trademark rights in clause 4a. clause 4d will have to be removed.
• MIT No Attribution License but s/Software/image/ - NIH syndrome
• Do nothing, but make it clear that badge images themselves actually require attribution to the Creative Commons organization. The icons, being a part of Unicode, would seem to qualify for exemption from copyright as a typeface, but this might vary by jurisdiction. This is not my preferred solution.

Additional context

yes, i see the text "For the avoidance of doubt, you do not need our permission to use the license buttons" on the policy page, but it doesn't actually clarify this issue.

Implementation

• add text to the policy page granting a permissive copyright license to the icons and badges