[Clipart] Copyrighted material appearing on the website.

[J. Alves]

Sorry Pandora's box has been opened! But I guess this is an important
discussion...

I took a quick look at a few, will try to do more later. Here they go.

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 11:48 PM, chovynz <chovynz at gmail.com> wrote:
> Can someone please check these?
>
> I'm not expert enough to indicate if this is PD or is too similar to the
> windows logo.)

Not very hopeful in my opinion -- too similar to the original Windows
logo to be considered a parody, but that's my opinion. If the swastika
shape was more exaggerated, then I think it would be alright. The way
it is now, I can only see a little swastikaracter (ah-hem) there
because I've been told it's there...

> http://www.openclipart.org/detail/20913 (Gimp text)

I briefly searched the GIMP site, and could find no license terms of
their artwork -- which could be Free like the code, or not. The
manual, for example (http://docs.gimp.org/2.6/en/), is licensed as GNU
Free Documentation. The only hint I found was that, at the bottom of
some pages, there is "© 2001-2009 The GIMP Team".

> http://www.openclipart.org/detail/20399 (Ubuntu again)

Ubuntu logos are not to be used, I'd say, given their "Legal" page:
http://www.ubuntu.com/legal

> http://www.openclipart.org/detail/21225 (I've tried tracing the copyright of
> this logo but the language is spanish and I'm having trouble tracking down
> any written info on it. If someone else could, that would be great.
> http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&sl=es&tl=en&u=http://www.guardiacivil.org/prensa/identidad/logosimbolo.jsp&rurl=translate.google.com&twu=1&usg=ALkJrhjULQfNxj9d2m8-Tfw53enjqxcvYw
> <http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&sl=es&tl=en&u=http://www.guardiacivil.org/prensa/identidad/logosimbolo.jsp&rurl=translate.google.com&twu=1&usg=ALkJrhjULQfNxj9d2m8-Tfw53enjqxcvYw>

According to the Wikipedia page, this is public domain since the
author rights have expired (that's what it says there, now whether
it's true, that's a different story...) :-)

> http://www.openclipart.org/detail/29159 (Unsure)

Don't worry about this one, it is fine. First of all, it's different
enough from Tux, I think.

But more important: long time ago I read that Tux, the Linux penguin,
was put in the Public Domain by its author Larry Ewing. So now I went
to the Wikipedia page for Tux
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tux.png), and found something a
little different:

The original Tux, the official Linux mascot created by Larry Ewing [1]
in 1996: Permission to use and/or modify this image is granted
provided you acknowledge me lewing at isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP if
someone asks.

So I guess it would be fine even if it were the original Tux, no?

J

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
João Marcelo Pereira Alves (J) - Genomics, Molecular Phylogeny and Evolution
Dept. Microbiology & Immunology - MCV/VCU - Richmond, VA, USA
f. 1-804-828-3897 / 804-852-1234 - http://bioinfo.lpb.mic.vcu.edu