FBI to Wikipedia: You Can't Use Our Seal

Agencies don't much like it when organizations make use of their official seals for commercial purposes, and regularly ask them to stop. But the FBI is taking it a step further, the New York Times reports. It has sent a letter to Wikipedia's overseers, saying they must remove an image of the FBI seal from the online encyclopedia's entry on the agency.

Regulations governing the use of agency insignias and seals, Federal law of the Code of Federal Regulations, strictly limits the use of agency insignias, the FBI's lawyers said. "The inclusion of a high quality graphic of the FBI seal on Wikipedia is particularly problematic," they wrote, "because it facilitates both deliberate and unwitting violations of these restrictions by Wikipedia users."

Wikipedia's own lawyers, though, are not taking the request lying down. The Wikimedia Foundation's general counsel, Mike Godwin, sent a folksy yet sharply worded letter back to the FBI, accusing the agency's lawyers of "creative editing" of the federal statute in question in their letter.

"Even if it could be proved that someone, somewhere, found a way to use a Wikipedia article illustration to facilitate a fraudulent representation, that would not render the illustration itself unlawful under the statute," Godwin wrote. Under the law, he said, the definition of "insignia" is limited to "those objects which are similar in nature to badges and identification cards."

"We must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version ... that you forwarded to us," Godwin wrote, and concluded, "we are prepared to argue our view in court."