[Openicc] Setting copyright and licence in profiles

[Chris Murphy]

On Nov 23, 2012, at 10:06 AM, Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 23 November 2012 15:52, Chris Murphy <chris at colorremedies.com> wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> Sure, that's not ideal tho. Maybe "No copyright and in the Public Domain".

Uncopyrighted / public domain has the small problem that derivatives can step on the free license with a distinctly non-free license. It's ridiculous that someone would do this, but I've got a litany of examples of  companies doing exactly this b.s. to the degree they've renamed "Adobe RGB (1998)" to "Epson Adobe RGB (1998)" removed the Adobe copyright information, and inserted Epson copyright information. Epson isn't the only company that's done this.


> 
>> For profiles that copyright doesn't apply, how about GPLv2 licensed?
> 
> GPL isn't a great choice for binary files, the creative commons
> licences seem much more suitable for content, e.g. CC0.

OK.
> 
>> Since the CMM doesn't consume the tag, it seems like the spec could change without changing CMMs.
> 
> Right, it's just another optional tag.

Getting optional tags into the spec isn't as big a deal. But right now the copyright tag is required. To get a license tag that's required would take a lot longer.

> 
>> 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.
> 
> I do think some profiles need copyright *and* licence information.
> Maybe I could just change the label in the GUI from "Copyright" to
> "Usage" or something equally vague. It depends how easy it would be to
> add another tag.

Is there a character that could be used to separate copyright and licensing, so that the information could be encoded in one tag, but presented reliably in UI as separate copyright and usage? Because making this a recommendation by the ICC is probably even easier than an optional licensing tag.


Chris Murphy