[Clipart] Need other people's judgements on these maybe incompatible clipart

[Nathan Eady]

chovynz <chovynz at gmail.com> writes:

> My Question: These two do not have the no-commercial restriction on
> them, however they *are *under a CC licence. Does that licence, even
> one as open as BY, disqualify it for PD OCAL? 

It does, unless the copyright holder releases it from those
restrictions.  The "BY" in CC parlance refers to an attribution
requirement.  For clipart, attribution is an entirely unwelcome
requirement.  Clipart, by definition, can be used without attribution.
That's pretty much the whole point.  You can take it and stick it in
your thing (presentation, flier, website, book, whatever), and that's
it, no hassle.  You can put in just the image, with no extra baggage
(with, for instance, no extra copyright notices or attributions).

If attribution is required, the artwork is unusable in nearly all
clipart use cases.  In fact, I would say the attribution requirement
is much worse for clip art than the non-commercial requirement.  A lot
of clip-art users don't need to use the artwork commercially (I sure
don't), but virtually nobody wants to attribute every piece of clip
art every time it's used.  That's an odious, onerous, deal-breaker of
a license term.

For example, if you're making up a flyer to hand out, and you're
looking for a piece of clipart for the flyer, do you really want to
have to worry about whether you have to put a note on the flyer
attributing the image to its author?  Perhaps more to the point, if
you're looking for a piece of clip-art to illustrate something on your
website or blog, do you want to have to worry about whether the
license that this so-called "clip-art" is under requires you to place
an acknowledgement, on every page that uses the image, indicating
where you got the picture, or who created it?

Traditionally, at least in the US, a lot of people *use* images as
clip art that aren't strictly public domain.  For small-run printed
items that are only ever distributed locally, such as "Free Car Wash"
fliers and "Lost Dog" posters, this seldom causes major problems,
because the publishers of the original work (usually) neither know nor
really care much about such uses.  It's (ordinarily) not relevant to
them, so they (typically) don't make problems for you.  (This is not,
however, legal advice.)

When you start putting stuff on the web, though, you start running
into the possibility of getting noticed and the potential for legal
problems.  If this were not a problem, people could just use Google
Image Search for all their clip art needs.  Back here in the real
world, where the lawyers have for some reason not yet all been
exterminated, that approach is...  let's just say "inadvisable".  This
is one of the reasons OCAL exists.  It is a collection of images that
are safe to use and re-use, without jumping through hoops.

Attribution definitely counts as a hoop.

People who want a place to share their attribution-licensed artwork
should be directed elsewhere.  Tell them to go put it on DeviantArt or
Flickr or PhotoBucket or one of the thousands of other such sites.  If
it's not public domain, then it's not clip art, and it doesn't belong
in the Open Clip Art Library.  (We can say this as politely and
tactfully as possible, of course, but we should also be clear.)

> (Open?)
> http://www.openclipart.org/detail/22183
> I think this is significantly NOT the recognised GNU image, 

Agreed.  It obviously depicts a wildebeast, but there's nothing wrong
with that.  You can submit a mouse any time you want, as long as it's
not Mickey Mouse or Tom or Ignatz or some other protected character or
image.  Wildebeasts aren't as common as mice, but the same principle
holds.  So unless there's some additional uncited source of which I am
not aware, it's fine.

-- 
Nathan Eady
Galion Public Library