[Clipart] Che image is not public domain

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Alan Horkan <horkana at maths.tcd.ie> writes:

> We now get into the sticky questions of what is and what is not an
> original work.  

I think just tracing does not give you an original work, but a
derivative work.  There is a blurry line, but I think it's a little
further over than this.

> Given that we have quite a few pieces of clipart which were
> generated by tracing photos it could be very difficult to be sure
> about the rights of certain files.

Well, if the photo's copyright belongs to the person who submitted the
thing, then it's in the clear.  For instance, the image of the library
is traced from a photograph that I took, using the library's digital
camera, so unless my employer objects (which is unlikely in the
extreme, given the general opinion of librarians in general and our
director in particular regarding copyright issues), there is no
problem with that one.

> Use of the Debian logo and other logos and other trademarks may also be
> problematic.

Yes, trademarks are another issue.  The logos and some of the icons
worry me from that respect.

> I'd hate to see these kinds of files removed entirely from the repository
> but we need a safe place to put files like these so they are excluded from
> the main distribution until we can be sure one way or the other.

Well, files that we don't include in the collection are not, as a
rule, deleted and lost forever.  Each release since circa 0.09 (before
we started excluding images due to trademark issues) has a failed
files zipfile, which contains everything we excluded.  If we get to
the point where we want to release a separate package of things that
might have copyright or trademark issues but yet be useful for some
purposes, we can go back to those and recover them all, no problem.
Similarly, the various raster images we have received (and even some
formats that aren't really image formats; there have been some PDFs,
for reasons that elude me) are all there too.  They're just not
included in the actual releases.

> Did the Creative Commons people provide any expert advice on this in
> the end?

Dunno.

-- 
Open Clip Art Library:  Drawing Together
http://www.openclipart.org/