[Clipart] rss Icon copyright?

[Nathan Eady]

chovynz <chovynz at gmail.com> writes:

> We need an answer on the rss icon copyright
> status. http://www.openclipart.org/search/?query=rss
> Is it copyrighted or not? Can you fantastic people put your heads
> together to find out if the rss icon has any sort of licence on it?
> I'm looking into the wikipedia page, and the Mozilla site.
>
> "molumen <http://www.openclipart.org/user-detail/molumen> said on
> 2008-02-14 14:40:29
> According to wikipedia the feed icon is licenced under Mozilla's MPL /
> GPL / LGPL tri-license. Can it be released under PD then?"

GPL, LGPL, and MPL are all share-alike licenses.  Items distributed
under these licenses are copyright-protected and cannot be legally
distributed, modified, or incorporated into another work except under
the terms of the licenses.

For clip-art, share alike licenses are totally unacceptable.  

If you inserted the artwork into a document and distributed the
document, you would be obligated to license the document to everyone
you give a copy to under the same license(s) under which you received
the artwork.  (Among other things, if you were to print a flier
containing this artwork and hand it out, you would probably be
obligated to offer a software copy of the file to every single person
you hand a copy of the flier to.  And if they want to pass the flier
you give them on to a friend or family member, they'd be obligated in
the same way.)  Also, if the artwork comes in a vector format (like
SVG) and you make a bitmap (e.g., PNG or JPEG) from it, or even
convert to a different vector format that doesn't support all the
features of the image (such as converting to PostScript and losing the
gradients), you would not be allowed to distribute the transformed
version without also distributing the "source" (SVG) that it came
from.  

Clearly these are not restrictions that most users of clip-art would
expect or be happy to accept and abide by.

OCAL definitely should not accept any submissions of artwork that are
share-alike licensed.  Share-alike licenses are intended for software
source code, NOT for clip art.

Frankly, share-alike licenses can be a real pain even for software
source code, because pretty much every single one of them is mutually
incompatible with every other one.  (That's why Mozilla does
tri-licensing: because if they distributed software under the MPL
only, their code would be incompatible with and could not be legally
linked against GPL-licensed code and distributed, among other things.)

The only thing more restrictive than a share-alike clause is a license
that's not open-source at all.

-- 
Nathan Eady
Galion Public Library