[Tango-artists] Commercial closed Source Application and Tango Icons

[William Szilveszter]

Matt, of course:

"means a work based upon the Work or upon the Work and other 
pre-existing works [...] in which the Work may be recast, transformed, 
or adapted..."

Even changing one pixel is a transformation. Rotation is an image 
transformation or adaptation. As it stands, any type of manipulation, 
yes even a mere pixel discolouration, or movement counts as an 
adaptation or transformation. Even image resizing falls under these 
"guidelines." Basically we are talking about any type of post-processing 
to the image.

Transformation is: "To change the nature, function, or condition of; 
convert"

Your argument begins there and I would say that any change to the image 
itself (which is what is being copyrighted here) constitutes such a 
"change," no matter how small.

The license is clear enough in this respect and if someone wants to 
raise these very minute discrepancies or trivial concerns, then that is 
for the courts, and you would need to show why rotation or resizing is 
not considered transformation or adaptation (something which I believe 
would be very difficult to argue for).

If you edit the path or file name, that has nothing to do with the image 
itself (and as such, falls outside of what we are dealing with here) and 
would not hold much water if taken to court. I could see a successful 
and perhaps rather easy argument that image file names or paths are not 
what is being copyrighted here.

However, legal contracts are always open for interpretation and that is 
why we have lawyers.

I understand that arguments can be made for portions of the CC license, 
but for the purposes here, the above CC seems more than sufficient, 
though not without argument; however, none of them are  very strong, if 
at all defensible.

Cheers,

Will

Matt Chaput wrote:
> William Szilveszter wrote:
>> "**"Derivative Work"** means a work based upon the Work or upon the 
>> Work and other pre-existing works, such as a translation, musical 
>> arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, 
>> sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any 
>> other form in which the Work may be recast, transformed, or adapted, 
>> except that a work that constitutes a Collective Work will not be 
>> considered a Derivative Work for the purpose of this License. For the 
>> avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical composition or sound 
>> recording, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a 
>> moving image ("synching") will be considered a Derivative Work for 
>> the purpose of this License."
>>
>> This information is available here: 
>> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/legalcode
>>
>> I think that explanation is more than sufficient.
>
> Sorry, but I disagree that it's sufficiently unambiguous. If I copy 
> and paste an element of a Tango icon (an arrow, say) into an icon I'm 
> doing, is that a derivative work? Or only if I rotate it? Or only if I 
> edit the paths?
>
> Matt
>