[Clipart] Copyrighted material appearing on the website.

[Nathan Eady]

chovynz <chovynz at gmail.com> writes:

> http://www.openclipart.org/detail/10731

> http://www.openclipart.org/detail/19989 (Windows logo with
> swastika. Iffy. I'm not expert enough to indicate if this is PD or is
> too similar to the windows logo.)

As far as Copyright law, this one would fall under the parody
exemption for free use.

Trademark law, however, will cost you gazillions of dollars, your
firstborn child, and your family honor if you try to use this logo or
anything like it in any kind of advertising for any kind of software
(or probably any other technology-related product).  Microsoft's legal
team would eat your viscera for breakfast on toast and then plow salt
into your family's landholdings.

If your product were totally unrelated to technology, they might just
bury you under a metric passel of legal notices and court orders.

> http://www.openclipart.org/detail/20916
> http://www.openclipart.org/detail/20917
> http://www.openclipart.org/detail/20918
> http://www.openclipart.org/detail/20919
> http://www.openclipart.org/detail/20920

I commented on the first of those already, and the rest of them are
almost certainly in the same boat.  In short, they're not in the
public domain.

> http://www.openclipart.org/detail/28938

Is that actually a logo of anything?  The word "dedos" just means
"fingers" (in Iberian languages), which seems like a pretty weird name
for a trademark...  Wait, nevermind, I found it:
http://dedosestudio.blogspot.com/
Yeah, we should probably hide that then.

> http://www.openclipart.org/detail/29773

This one might be okay.  I'm pretty sure the title just means
"starfish", which is the primary object depicted.  It does have a
logo-ish shape and style, but that's inconclusive, and a quick Google
search did not immediately turn up any obvious source. (There are lots
of results, but the ones on the first page all seem unrelated to the
image.)  I think I would leave it alone unless someone can identify
a specific trademark (or copyright) owner that it infringes.

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

Oh, joy, and *interesting* case...

I don't think that's similar enough to Ewing's image to run into any
problems with his copyright.  It uses more or less the same colors
(approximately: black, white, and yellow/orange), but almost any
drawing of a penguin would do, and Ewing's wouldn't be the first, so I
don't see how that could make it derivative.  The overall shape is not
at all the same as Tux's, and the only similarities in features that I
see (e.g., having two eyes in approximately a certain portion of the
face) are just due to its being a depiction of a penguin.

There's the word Tux, but if that's a trademark I'm not aware of it,
and it's totally ineligible for copyright protection (because it's
only three letters long, and also because it's a dictionary word going
back at least to the early twenties).  

So I believe this is clear from any charges of "not being PD because
it's Tux".  It's not Larry Ewing's Tux.

That leaves the question of whether this *specific* drawing (of a
bovinized penguin) is copyright-protected and therefore a problem.
Which is where it really gets interesting...

I did find basically the same image on tux.crystalxp.net with a
share-alike license, but the author listed there goes by the same
username as the person who uploaded it to OCAL, so it's very possible
that our contribution comes from the guy who created it.  Likely, I
would say.  So we may be in the clear, *unless* the operators of the
crystalxp "Tux factory" claim copyright on all images produced using
their software...

It is not obvious to me, after reading their general terms of use,
whether the crystalxp site operators do or do not claim copyright on
the images users create on their site.  On the one hand, "The present
internet site and the totality of its contents, including ...  images
... is copyright protected."  On the other hand, "The user is solely
and uniquely responsible for ... the content that he adds to the
site."  This is not the first image we've had contributed that was
created using their site, and it is unlikely to be the last, so it
would probably be worthwhile to pursue a clarification of this
question: does the user have copyright of the images they create using
the website, or do the website operators claim the copyright?

-- 
Nathan Eady
Galion Public Library