The sane solution if one wants to play fairly is to create a licenses page on the webpage or app and mention the source of the icons and other OS software used.
This way you are acknowledging the license and you distribute it too with the copy.
This is how the YouTube app does it for example on Android. Settings/About/OS licenses.
It's mostly tech and/or software dev centric brand logos, which isn't exactly what I expected. Not sure if that's licensing related or if that's just their area of interest.
1) Reasonable workplaces wouldn't be bothered if you browse HN while you would otherwise be unproductive (waiting for something to download or compile or load or something).
2) People use SFW/NSFW even when not at work; you wouldn't open an NSFW link in a university lecture hall because it didn't say NSFULH.
Given the actual condition being imposed on users of MIT/Expat-licensed assets:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.
I'm failing to see what the hold-up is here.
- If it's an SVG file, what's wrong with including the license text as a comment?
- If it's a raster image, what's wrong with including the license text in the metadata?
The way I'm reading this, as long as the license text is somehow embedded in the asset - whether or not it's actually visible to someone viewing it as an image - then that fulfills the terms of the license, no?
If such an embedded license is sufficient, then I fail to see what the problem is. Is it just file size? Are these people really so averse to content creators being credited for their work that said consumers of said works consider embedded attribution/licensing unacceptable (and why)?
If such an embedded license is not sufficient, then why is it insufficient?
Obligatory: I ain't a lawyer. Given the sorts of quibbling that seems to be happening over a three-paragraph license that's ubiquitous in the world of software, I don't envy the actual lawyers one bit.
The stated purpose of the project is "Icons under 1KB each". So embedding a 1KB license in each one would defeat the purpose.
Even if file size is not the main goal, embedding metadata could be self-defeating in other ways. If the license requires making the license available to end-users, would that prevent the use of asset pipeline optimization tools? (The motivation for using a permissive license is often to enable compatibility with general-purpose tools.) If the license only requires making the license available to maintainers, then why embed it in the first place?
My question is also about the other various instances of objections to MIT-licensed assets that were raised (i.e. in the article linked in the issue, as well as in other related issues). You're right that this specific case justifies minimal file sizes; maybe a modified/clarified license that only requires the copyright statement and a URL pointing to the license would be a better fit?
Re: asset pipelines, those would only be an issue if one of the "optimizations" is to strip metadata, which sounds an awful lot like a premature optimization to me.
On another note: most compression algorithms in vogue today can shrink the Expat license to less than ⅔ the plaintext size when base64-encoded. That's still hefty in the context of this specific project, but does still technically satisfy the letter (albeit probably not the spirit) of the license's requirements. Compressing the whole SVG file could almost certainly allow the icons to stay under 1kb, at least until decompressed (and an in-memory representation of that SVG file doesn't usually need to preserve comments).
Complying with the MIT license by including it in each SVG file would defeat the stated purpose of "SuperTinyIcons" - to consume very few bytes - by ~tripling the file size of each icon.
The icons are ~500 bytes - the license is over 1 kilobyte.
That wouldn't comply with the license terms, which require the first two paragraphs (The above copyright notice and this permission notice) to be included in copies. LibreJS tags don't include that.
I run this repo, but didn't open the comment. Curious to know why others think.
I chose MIT out of laziness, and because that's what done of the source files were using. I've never heard of the "Blue Oak" licence the comment refers to.
Lots of people and companies have contributed to the icon set over the last couple of years without issue.
I'm of the opinion that having an acknowledgements section of an app / website is sufficient.
I suppose I could add some metadata to each file, but that would inflate most of them to over 1KB.
Please if you are working/setting licenses, make sure it's not just an opinion and that there's enough data/you do enough research to back it up. As explained in many sites, MIT for code, CC for art.
It depends. SVGs could be both if, for example, they were hand-crafted. Code itself often is art because it requires creative skill and imagination to produce.
How can these be licensed in any way, when the artwork is of trademarked logos? Genuine question. Aren't you entirely relying on the fact that the owners of the copyright of the logos benefits from your use and are unlikely to chase? I mean, if I decided my project was compatible with Coca-Cola and slapped the Coke logo on it, they'd come after me, no? Even if I had redrawn the logo myself.
Trademark is different from copyright in that you can have a trademarked logo on your webpage (or in any other work) as long as you aren’t implying association with the owner of the mark. Trademark owners can’t come after you for, say, writing a scathing critique of their product that includes their logo for reference. But they can come after you if you add their logo to a list of “companies using this library!” without their permission.
There are tons of questions I admittedly have about why reality shows blur out logos (I imagine they’re avoiding creating the impression that a brand has endorsed the crazy stuff happening on the show through product placement) and why developers can include the github logo in reference to the github repo for a project when neither the author nor the project are associated with the github brand (my guess is that there’s a carve-out for that sort of thing, since github wants people to do this as much as possible).
I believe you're absolutely right in general, but it also helps that GitHub has explicitly allowed their logo's usage for that scenario for a while: https://github.com/logos
> There are tons of questions I admittedly have about why reality shows blur out logos (I imagine they’re avoiding creating the impression that a brand has endorsed the crazy stuff happening on the show through product placement)
Yeah. I've been watching a certain popular and somewhat NSFW Canadian mockumentary series, and they're very consistent and conspicuous about blurring out logos on seemingly random things. There could be crazy things happening on the screen, and suddenly you notice a random bag of chips being almost completely blurred. I've been wondering whether they did that to avoid lawsuits, as an artistic decision, or both.
My favorite is when they use Fiji water in TV shows - they peel off the labels but there's no freaking other water company in the world that uses the iconic shape.
And it's really weird that they use Fiji so much without attribution - it's used so often that you'd think they paid to be in the show but clearly the peeled off the label. Did they pay enough to have the iconic bottle but not enough to see the word Fiji?
Of note: you can trademark things other than logos as long as they are non-functional parts of the product (i.e. a bike maker couldn't trademark the shape of their gears to screw competitors). So it's totally possible that Fiji might have a trademark on that bottle shape. It would certainly make sense, since that shape is so iconic and so associated with them that if someone else were to put their water in bottles with that shape, it could possibly be mistaken by consumers for Fiji Water.
Aside: You don't need to inform people you're not a lawyer. But, if you were, you would need to tell them "I am not your lawyer" unless, in fact, you were.
My favourite blurb along those lines, from a forum, "I am a lawyer. But I'm not your lawyer. And, like contraceptives: someone else's lawyer won't protect you."
my understanding is that BSD, MIT, and CC0 can basically be thought of as quitclaim deeds. They only apply to any interest the creator might have had. NO WARRANTY, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.
I agree with the spirit of your comment (CC makes sense for SVGs), but I also don't think it's quite as simple as content vs. code. there are many icon sets that are distributed as font binaries, for example, which are software; in which case the OFL (SIL open font license -- https://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id...) might make more sense.
This way you are acknowledging the license and you distribute it too with the copy.
This is how the YouTube app does it for example on Android. Settings/About/OS licenses.