Here is the answer from Karl Berry (from TeXLive):
Hi Paul - re trademarks and TeX Live, Donald Robertson at the FSF
reminded me that they did write guidelines about this issue wrt free
system distributions:
https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html#trademarks
The basic point being that trademarks in and of themselves are not a
problem -- yay. The problem would be if there is some kind of
statement in the (copyright) license saying that the trademarks must
not be removed, or otherwise forbidding redistribution, etc.
I don't think that's the case with the Masaryk packages, or
thesis/etc. packages in general, or fontawesome. Anyone modifying
those packages or logos can remove the trademarks (if they're doing
something different), or keep them (if they're making something
relevant to the university), according to the usual rules for
trademarks. Which is, don't make use of them to refer to something
else.
In general, whether a given trademark is copyrightable or not is
clearly a massive gray area. If an organization asserts copyright on
their logo (unless they use a free software license for it, which I
expect would essentially never be the case), I'm certainly not going
to argue about that, and the packages would have to be removed. On the
other hand, if there is no explicit information, or the only
information is that it's not copyrightable, as you found at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logo_Masaryk_University.svg
then that's fine, we can accept it until and unless a problem shows
up.
I have updated https://tug.org/texlive/copying.html with a brief
statement along these lines.
Thanks for bringing this up. --best, karl.
Here is an extract from the FSF guidelines:
Trademarks
Trademarks are associated with some software. For example, the name of
a program may be trademarked, or its interface may display a
trademarked logo. Often, the use of these marks will be controlled in
some way; in particular, developers are commonly asked to remove
references to the trademark from the software when they modify it.
In extreme cases, these restrictions may effectively render the
program nonfree. It is unfair for someone to ask you to remove a
trademark from modified code if that trademark is scattered all
throughout the original source. As long as the practical requirements
are reasonable, however, free system distributions may include these
programs, either with or without the trademarks.
Similarly, the distribution itself may hold particular trademarks. It
is not a problem if modification requires removal of these trademarks,
as long as they can readily be removed without losing functionality.
However, it is unacceptable to use trademarks to restrict verbatim
copying and redistribution of the whole distribution, or any part.
