[Openicc] Setting copyright and licence in profiles

[Chris Murphy]

On Nov 23, 2012, at 6:46 AM, Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> In shared-color-profiles we're now creating some of the RGB spaces
> from raw values (e.g.
> http://www.brucelindbloom.com/index.html?WorkingSpaceInfo.html) and
> I'm wondering what to do with the licensing and copyright information.
> 
> I don't think it's right we're currently trying to squash both the
> copyright and licence into the same field. They are not the same thing
> at all. For some profiles the concept of copyright just doesn't apply
> at all.

The ICC spec says to squash them together in the same tag, so until that changes that's where it's expected to be found.
> 
> What I'm tempted to do is set the profile copyright string to either
> "No copyright" or just not set the cmsInfoCopyright tag at all.
> 
> I'm also proposing to add some DICT metadata, something like "Licence"
> = "Public Domain"

For profiles that copyright doesn't apply, how about GPLv2 licensed?

> 
> Of course, in an ideal world we could have a proper cmsSigLicenceTag
> tag that we could put mluc translations in. I don't know how feasible
> that would be to get into the official specification, or maybe just to
> get supported in LCMS2 as a semi-private tag.

Since the CMM doesn't consume the tag, it seems like the spec could change without changing CMMs. But I don't know if you'd see the ICC "backport" this tag to say ICC v2 profiles or not. I'll ask.

The other way to look at this is that a copyright notice is less important than a licensing notice, and the copyright tag should tacitly be considered a licensing tag.


Chris Murphy