[Openicc] shared-color-profiles issues [was: new/old ICC profile package]

[Chris Lilley]

Hi Glenn

On Wednesday, September 1, 2010, 2:55:25 AM, glennrp wrote:

grp> http://www.color.org/srgbprofiles.xalter

grp> I wasn't aware that ICC has approved 5 different sRGB
grp> profiles (actually 3 different with 2 deprecated names).
grp> I wonder which one we mean by the PNG sRGB chunk?  I
grp> guess the v2 without black-point.

Yes, for systems that only understand ICC v.2 (at this point I think that means Firefox 3.x and WinXP) I agree, the 'no black scaling' sRGB profile with the rendering intent set to relative colorimetric.

The other rendering intents can be specified, but either don't do anything, or do the wrong thing.

For systems that understand ICC v.4 (OS X, Vista, Win7, Linux with lcms2, Safari, IE9) then sRGB_v4_ICC_preference.icc would be the best version. Relative colorimetric should give the same result as v.2, I think, and perceptual would give a useful result.

sRGB_v4_ICC_preference_displayclass.icc is a hack around known bugs.


grp> How did the sRGB profile become public domain?
grp> The iCC seems to think it's copyright and licensed
grp> by them with a BSD-like license.

The profiles from the ICC are clearly not public domain, but the license says:

To anyone who acknowledges that the file "sRGB_v4_ICC_preference.icc" is provided "AS IS" WITH NO EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTY, permission to use, copy and distribute this file for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that the file is not changed including the ICC copyright notice tag, and that the name of ICC shall not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software without specific, written prior permission. ICC makes no representations about the suitability of this software for any purpose. 

which seems to clearly cover putting that profile into an ICC package, for example. Provided of course that it has not been edited to Correct The Spelling or whatever other edits were made; there does not seem to be a licence to produce derived versions, even if such derivatives were desirable which is not clearly the case.

Other profiles for the same colourspace could have other licenses, of course.

-- 
 Chris Lilley   Technical Director, Interaction Domain                 
 W3C Graphics Activity Lead, Fonts Activity Lead
 Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG
 Member, CSS, WebFonts, SVG Working Groups