Yes, I said 'restricted use logo' above; I wasn't talking about the open use one. My point is that Debian, like Canonical, may assert their intellectual proper

Yes, I said 'restricted use logo' above; I wasn't talking about the open use one. My point is that Debian, like Canonical, may assert their intellectual property rights for whatever purposes they see fit. Some folks (not necessarily you) are confusing "can they" with "should they" w.r.t. Canonical. You're right that copyright and trademark law are two different things. That said, the word "trademark" occurs on that page only in the footer, applied to the name Debian. Nowhere (on that page at least) are the images asserted as trademarks, whereas there's a prominent copyright notice near each logo. I suppose the copyright could be read to apply to the license text and not to the logo, although that would be odd, and inconsistent with the explicit copyright wording of the open use logo.